Living Paintings is a virtual installation that transforms static paintings into interactive experiences by leveraging parallax movement. Shift your virtual perspective of the paintings by moving your cursor or by tilting your phone on mobile. For the full experience, click the [⤢] button to toggle full-screen.

This site was created by Laura Wilson as the final project for CLPS0540 Spring21 Simulating Reality: The (Curious) History and Science of Immersive Experiences, a Brown University course for Spring 2021.

I carefully disected each painting into layers using Adobe Photoshop, filling any holes with Photoshop's Content Aware Fill Tool. Then, I built a webpage to host the paintings, and utilized parallax.min.js to add parallax movement interaction for each layer. In most cases, I gave the foreground the highest relative velocity and decreased the velocity for each layer behind it to mimic a sense of depth in the paintings. The specific velocity values were based on my assumptions of depth of the painting's content, and then exaggerated to create a more immersive, engaging interactive experience.

You can check out my code in this GitHub repo!