This project was a part of MSc Interaction Design at IED Barcelona, done in collaboration with SONAR+D festival and Linking Realities.

SONAR+D is an international multidisciplinary festival happening every year in Barcelona. It gathers leading artists, creative technologists, designers, scientists and makers to participate in a carefully commissioned program with the aim of inspiring and networking. More information is available here.

Linking Realities is a Barcelona-based startup specialising in creating avatars for metaverse from a single selfie. More information is available here.

The brief was to create a futuristic booth to be presented during SONAR +D on 27-30 October 2021 at CCCB Barcelona. By using this booth, a user could reflect on the concept of virtual identity and create his own digital avatar that he could take away with him.

Project website: iamyou.unionavatars.com

Video about the project

3D avatar mesh

Firstly we, IED students, started with the concept for the avatar body. It was decided that the body mesh for the avatars shall be simplistic and genderless - because it is the first and most basic one, a virtual representation that later can be replaced, adjusted, upgraded to something different. 

I was responsible for creating the mesh. It has a realistic shape but is represented by the transparent wireframe. It is low-poly, making it easy to use in games, VR chat and other first forms of the metaverse.

Booth sketches

The next step was to design a physical booth for the festival. 

The team effort lead us to create a design that both corresponded to our vision for simplicity, cleanliness and futuristic feel - and fulfilled all the conditions and limitations imposed.

Preliminary booth sketches were created by me in Cinema 4D and rendered using VRay. These sketches were used by our team in developing the UX and also provided instructions for the construction team on site.

Booth presentation at the SONAR+D festival at CCCB

During the three days of SONAR+D festival the booth gathered attention from the public and allowed hundreds of people to create their own avatar. What is interesting, to the absolute majority of the visitors it was their first digital avatar.

This experience was a great opportunity for me to try myself in the fastly growing sphere of metaverse avatars - as well as an opportunity to educate a larger public about it.