Imagine yourself in the shoes of a painter during the Romantic era. It is your sole responsibility to make the king happy. And he does not like "bad" things. So, you better be good at removing them with your trusty brush.
Brush Hour is an immersive Augmented Reality (AR) experience that allows the user to slowly turn their physical reality into a living Romantic-era painting. As the user progresses through the experience, a narrator guides them into creating and upholding a romanticized illusion, hinting at the deceptive nature of the golden era’s art and its role as historical propaganda.
The experience places the player in a unique moral position, introducing two thematic and gameplay challenges:
Distorting Reality: The game asks a fundamental question: what if the idealized, distorted image of the Romantic era were based directly on the actual, current reality?
Moral Dilemma: The player must balance hiding uncomfortable truths (like poverty or corruption) to satisfy the king, lying to their audience, and preserving their own livelihood.
The core gameplay revolves around painting reality and managing the invasion of “negative influences”. The design required intuitive AR interactions to make the player feel like a true artist of the era:
Painting Reality
Using the controller as an extension of a painter's arm, the player sweeps their brush across the real-world environment to seamlessly apply a stylized Romantic painting effect.
Battling Corruption
Uncomfortable elements of reality constantly seep through, threatening to destroy the illusion. The player must actively manage and erase these negative influences to survive. The more time progresses, the harder it is to keep the illusion alive.
Dynamic Paintify
The world is dynamically rendered into art. The visual style adapts contextually based on the environment's colors, such as using wide horizontal strokes for clouds and the sky, as well as short vertical strokes for grass.
The project was built using the Unity Game Engine and Meta XR SDK, deployed on a standalone Meta Quest 3. A custom Paintify effect was developed to handle the visual transformation. It operates in three stages:
Accessing the Camera Passthrough API: The player’s environment is captured via the Quest 3’s front-facing cameras. To solve field-of-view limitations, the camera data is continuously stitched into a surrounding cubemap based on where the user is looking. This allows for the construction of an environment map, allowing the effect to take place even outside of the camera’s limited field of view.
Custom Compute Shader: The visual Paintify style is achieved using a compute shader. It utilizes a Voronoi noise pattern combined with Signed-Distance-Functions to sample colors. Depending on the HSV values of the real world, it dynamically applies different brush stroke textures (e.g., sky blue results in wide horizontal strokes).
Painting Mask: A secondary cubemap acts as a dynamic mask, allowing the user to progressively reveal the Paintify effect only where they have physically brushed.
An evaluation was conducted during the EPIC-WE Cultural Game Jam EXPO to assess user experience and potential simulator sickness.
Participants completed two task types:
Interface Exploration: A realistic, open-ended exploration of the game, tasked with painting their surroundings and hiding negative influences while listening to the king’s narration.
Feedback and Survey: Metrics collected included the Simulator-Sickness-Questionnaire (SSQ) and qualitative feedback interviews.
The EXPO showcase yielded valuable insights into the intersection of AR and cultural heritage:
No Significant Motion Sickness: A Wilcoxon-Signed-Rank-Test revealed no significant increase in nausea, dizziness, or vertigo, likely due to the stationary and deliberate nature of the painting mechanic.
Immersive Visuals: Users praised the highly unique experience of viewing the real world through the customized shader. The transformation successfully prompted players to reflect on the life of historical artists and the nature of propaganda.
Blurred Vision Increase: The only significant SSQ metric was an increase in blurred vision after gameplay, likely caused by the pixelation of the cubemap textures required to maintain standalone device performance.
Areas for Improvement: Some players struggled with the initial onboarding, not immediately realizing they needed to start painting right away. Future iterations would benefit from a more guided tutorial.
Brush Hour successfully demonstrated that Augmented Reality can be a powerful medium for cultural reflection, transforming the player’s immediate reality into an interactive canvas that questions the authenticity of historical art and modern media alike.