Designosaurs

Last year I worked with Lovebytes in sheffield to set up a schools digital creativity project called flutter. It was such a sucess that we were asked to repeat the process, but this time along a different theme, “Dinosaurs” – RAAaah!. This time I used Unity for the software development, but the actual process was fairly similar to flutter. Children were given simple dinosaur templates on sheets of paper to decorate and colour in any way they liked. They were encouraged to think about ideas of camoflage and pattern, and how those elements might have been used in the dinosaurs world. The templates themseves were simple UV unwraps of a set of threee 3D modelled dinosaurs, produced by my friend Alison Mealey. The childrens paper designs were than photogrphed via webcam and the resulting texture mapped in realtime onto one of around 30 dinosaurs that were wandering across a virtual plain. Children could also name their creations and the title would accompany their 3d monster as it roamed around.

The project was taken to schools across Yorkshire by Laura Robinson and Lovebytes where over 1,500 children made thier own dinos. Over a few days in June, a small installation in the Winter Gardens in Sheffield allowed visitors to see the dinosaurs that had been created and children who had taken part in the workshops could call up their own design from the database. There are images of the workshops and virtual dinos over on Lovebytes flickr