Digital Art Meets Physical: Introducing Acid Prints
From Screen to Space
I’ve been working on a little side project that combines my interests in art and technology which I’m happy to release today at acidprints.xyz. Since 2022, my friends and I have hosted digital art events featuring immersive projection mapping and augmented reality exhibits at Superjuicy. Our aim was to create a tangible interaction with digital art. Acid Prints embodies this principle by adding a digital dimension to physical prints through mobile augmented reality. The process is straightforward:
- Acquire a physical print.
- Scan a QR code or click a link, directing you to the Instagram camera.
- Point your phone at the print to animate it with AR.
AR art has been explored before by pioneers like Sutu and his Eyejack app, Artivive and others, which require a proprietary app. Like previous iterations of this concept, Acid Prints utilizes what is known as “Magic Window” AR, which operates through a smartphone in a similar manner to Instagram and Snapchat face filters.
Built to Share
Over time the AR technology in social media platforms has gotten a lot better so we decided to leverage them instead of building an entirely new app. Most people already have Instagram and Facebook, so we built the AR filters in Meta’s AR creation tool Spark Studio to integrate directly with these platforms. This removes having to download an additional app and also encourages sharing the art, which I think is a key part of any art experience.
The future of AR
Soon AR art experiences will live outside of the phone. Big players like Meta and Apple keep investing in the development of better and better headsets and it’s not unlikely that we might casually experience art with devices like the Quest or the Apple Vision Pro when they become compact and comfortable enough. The physical print version of your digital art will be optional at that point, but I think Acid Prints is for the people who know they can have their cake and eat it too. I personally love my art in the analog and digital and believe the experience is best when intertwined.
Bringing Digital Art Home
For a lot of my career I’ve been a VR producer at game studios where my goal has been to to unite the work of talented engineers with talented artists, and I’ve developed a deep appreciation for both disciplines. Many of the first prints were created by me with the help of Midjourney, though my good friend Bodh.io was kind enough to let me use his art for early experiments. He is the first featured artist on Acid Prints and I hope we can help other animators and 3D artists push their art this way too. If you’re a digital artist interested in collaborating, please do reach out.
While I enjoy saving digital art on Instagram, Behance, and similar platforms, I’ve always been disappointed that I couldn’t display it physically in my home. AR art changes that, allowing me to bring digital creations into my physical space. I hope there’s other people that will enjoy art this way too. Either way, it’s been a lot of fun putting this together. I hope you get the chance to check out the site!
www.acidprints.xyz
Follow us at @acicprints.xyz and @superjuicy.art
