Mary
Zhang

 
is a creative technologist based in Los Angeles. Her expanded practice involves simple robotics, olfactive interactions, creative coding, and hardware prototyping.

Her work seeks to investigate the implications of ever-evolving technology as tools, and how our labors and ecologies shift as consequence.




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Perfume Room


Tools
Unreal Engine, Blender

Methods
Interaction programming, animating, 
3D modeling


Building a virtual perfume room with interactive archive of scents and notes. Amassing and animating scents encountered in real life into an effervescent virtual space. 

“Imagine if you could move through Fragrantica as if it were a museum...”







Using Unreal Engine’s Niagara particle system and UI widgets, translucent and bubbly materials are applied around these atmospheric encounters. Bottles swell and bubble up as you approach, and information cards hover above within proximity. 




Close-up details of glass
Animated glass condensation




Coding actors using blueprints to specify hovering, spinning and growing animations upon player interaction. Text information also bubbles up upon proximity, cueing perfume names and associated notes, as if Fragrantica were a navigable first-person world.




Back shelf and counter navigation