About
Countless lives and Characters (无尽人字) is a real time simulation I created in my internship with TeamLab.
During the winter break of 2019, I was in three different cities in different countries, they are all very different but they all share some thing in common. They all have many many many people living inside of them.
Sometimes I got super overwhelmed by the crowd. Everybody’s trail of lives are just so unique, Just like the line we saw in the slide, They all have their own start and end.
But if we step back from all of this, maybe we can find some general patterns from all those trails.
7PM trains at Shinjiku station are so crowded, everybody comes and goes from different stations but they are all just going home. Couples fight, hug, kiss, all different actions but they all come from love. Kanji or Chinese Characters strike me as something that can capture those emergent patterns with elegance. And those microscopic random movements and the macroscopic emergence reminds me of boids simulations, so I was thinking why not combine them together.
Each boid is in constant motions, its never ending motions bears no life no death no coming no going no leaving no staying, every thing is temporary, everything is fleeting. The countless lives those boids represent, through motions, start to form the Kanjis/Chinese characters written above from a Buddhist script describing the nature of the life, the ultimate pattern,
“IMPERMANENCE”.
development
This project is developed in Unity. In order to create large scale boid simulation, with the help from Saki Komikado, I implemented the spatial-hashing algorithm with GPU Bitonic-Sort desribed here with compute shaders. You can find the source code here.