Heather Dunaway Smith Art Summary
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Summary
Heather Dunaway Smith is an interdisciplinary immersive artist exploring innovative forms of storytelling and audience participation through emerging technologies like augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and extended reality (XR). With a background in songwriting, painting, and theater, she is fascinated by integrating audiences into narratives in meaningful ways.
Heather has created various interactive experiences that combine visuals, audio, gestures, and context. Some notable projects include:
- The Door: A spatial song experience for Snap Spectacles using proximity and hand gestures to control music in a virtual environment.
- Future Garden: An AR mini-game where users plant magical seeds to grow flowers, unlocking abilities through voice commands and gestures.
- Mini Black Hole: A cathartic voice-controlled experience allowing users to banish spoken words into a virtual black hole.
- Coachella Desert Flower: An audio-reactive AR flower that changes shape and color based on music and time of day.
- Crossroads: An AR cube world released as an NFT, depicting two contrasting visions - one industrial and dystopian, the other harmonious with nature.
Heather’s work often incorporates natural elements and explores the relationship between technology and the environment. She aims to create immersive, multi-sensory experiences that enable new forms of creative expression and foster a deeper connection with the world around us.
Key Takeaways
- Heather is pioneering new forms of storytelling and audience participation through immersive technologies like AR/VR/XR.
- Her work blends various mediums like music, visuals, gestures, and voice commands to create multi-sensory interactive experiences.
- Notable projects include spatial audio songs controlled by proximity and gestures, AR mini-games with voice commands, and AR nature-inspired worlds.
- A key focus is exploring the relationship between technology and the natural environment through creative expression.
- Heather’s interdisciplinary approach allows her to experiment with novel ways of integrating audiences into narratives and enabling new forms of artistic expression.
- Her work demonstrates the potential of emerging technologies to reshape how we experience and interact with art and stories.
Speakers
- Heather Dunaway Smith
- Immersive artist
- Expertise in storytelling, music, visuals, interactivity, and emerging technologies (AR/VR/XR)
- Key contributions: Interactive spatial audio experiences, AR flower gardens, voice-controlled black holes, nature-inspired AR worlds