Biggest Outdoor AR Show in Taiwan: SU’s ‘ARt Traveler’ Festival Taps into Metaverse

Marking its fifth year and kicking off from December 23^rd, 2021, SU’s annual “ARt Traveler” Festival added six augmented reality (AR) artworks this year created by four artists who led 46 Soochow students to enrich the school’s “Metaverse.” 

Since 2017, this digital art project has worked with a total of 28 artists and more than 200 SU students, and constructed and displayed 35 art pieces in the school’s Waishuangsi and Downtown campuses, making the Festival the largest outdoor AR art display event in Taiwan to this day.

This year’s new exhibits include: the only physically displayed piece “The Little Garden” created under the collaboration of artist Lan-Ya Huang and SU students; three silkscreen works “The Whisper of Green Leaves,” “Between the Tree Shades,” and “The Fragments of Time” created by artist Meng-Yu Wen; artist Yi-Chieh Chen’s gigantic digital sculpture “The Speedy Flying” inspired by the cartoon Powerpuff Girls and digitally displayed at the sports field; a VR piece named after the school’s coordinates “25°05'39.1"N 121°32'43.8"E” by artist Wei-Hsuan Huang.

SU’s involvement with the Metaverse started five years ago with a series of AR campus projects led by Professor Wei-Gong Liu of Department of Sociology and his T-Hub team. Their works include the “Journey of the Heart” AR campus tour, “Humanity VR Lab” and of course, the annual “ARt Traveler” festival.

The term and idea of Metaverse created by Neal Stephenson in his 1992 Sci-Fi novel Snow Crash has taken over the globe as the most important word and concept in 2021. With top dogs of the technology and internet industries such as Google, Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft diving into the Metaverse, it will without a doubt become an inevitable part of human life in the near future.

“ARt Traveler” Festival is the result of the hard works of many teams and individuals involved. In an era where an art piece in the form of NFT (Non-Fungible Token) can be sold for over NT$1.9 billion, not only is “ARt Traveler” Festival a display of artistic creativity, but also a demonstration of SU’s dedication over the years in keeping up with the social and technological trends and creating valuable culture assets and exclusive memories for itself.