Four Seasons Fans

AR App Development

The folding fan, an essential part of Chinese traditional culture, carries rich cultural and historical value. Beyond its utilitarian function as a cooling device, it also served as a canvas for artistic expressions in ancient China. Furthermore, the four seasons have held a pivotal role in Chinese art for centuries. This has ignited our curiosity: What if we were to harness modern technologies, such as shaders, to craft contemporary fan art and bring it to life through the immersive medium of AR?

Fan Handle Design

The folding fan can be roughly divided into two parts: the handle and the fan face. For the handles, I created mood boards for each season and then used Blender to model them.

Fan Face Design

For fan faces, we used different technologies to utilize four different shaders.

Fan of Spring: For the fan of spring, we implemented a vine growing effect, using particle system. Through adjusting parameters, we could define vine's shape, material, growing speed and so on.

Fan of Summer: For our summer-themed fan, we envisioned a water-based design. Crafting this water fan involves complex processes like UV flow, mask testing, polar coordinate rotation, and more. A key element is the time-controlled UV flow, which enables us to simulate water flow.

Fan of Autumn: Thinking of the Autumn Fan brings to mind one adorned with maple leaves. Its creation has two parts: growing the maple leaves, similar to the Spring Fan using a particle system, and the falling and withering of leaves. We employed a shader script to achieve a rim dissolve material, simulating leaf burn.

Fan of Winter: The Winter Fan concept is simple: we wanted to make a freezing fan. To achieve this, we added an ice material over the original fan surface. By adjusting the material's opacity, we created a gradual freezing effect.

AR Effect

We employed the Unity library Vuforia for AR effects. Vuforia simplifies AR implementation by selecting recognition types, uploading images, and downloading Unity packages from its official website.

Demo Video