Disciples

“An interactive artwork which brings your Twitter followers to life. Visualised as human figures, custom artificial intelligence software triggers crowd hysteria around you. The desire to gain more followers presents a growing addiction for virtual admiration and acknowledgement - from known, unknown and sometimes fake personas. Every move you make influences the crowd, an ever-changing mass choreography, your ego becomes the focus.”

Disciples is an interactive, realtime installation built for Universal Everything. It’s the first release in an ongoing study of large crowd dynamics. After entering your twitter handle, your followers appear as people and begin to flock towards you. If you run, they run with you. If you stop, they form a crowd around you. The quantity and proximity of your followers creates an ever changing choral soundscape that responds to your every move.

Up to around 4,000 animated human meshes are rendered in realtime using GPU instancing. The crowd simulation is also run on the GPU using DX11 compute shaders. It’s all put together using Unity and runs on a PC with a modern, powerful graphics card. The piece can be projected at a resolution up to 4K and people interact with it via an Xbox controller.

The look and feel of the piece evolved over time from top-down with strong colours, to an angled overhead view with more natural colours and lighting.

Commissioned by UE
Concept by UE
Development by Chris Mullany

Read more at universaleverything.com.