We used William Bouguereau’s painting, “The Birth of Venus” as our motif. The concept is “Dress the Venus, who has been naked for 100 years, in a beautiful dress.” To create a couture for the Venus dress with detail and accuracy, we had to construct a design, that best fits the shapes and lines of the Venus’s body. In addition, for the dress to be reflected instantly onto the painting at the live performance, the best solution was to convert the Venus into a 3D model, so that the dress could be “drawn” directly.

*Bringing Venus to life: From Painting to 3D

We created a 3D statue of Venus in a virtual room, which enabled us to visually examine Venus’s body line and design the dress three-dimensionally.

*Drawing the Dress in VR

Then we “drew” the dress directly on Venus’s 3D statue, using Google’s VR drawing tool “Tilt Brush”.

*Dressing a 3D statue 

The dress was projected onto the statue of Venus using a three-dimensional projection technique called “pepper ghost”, so that it could be seen from 360-degrees.

*Replicating Bouguereau’s Touches & Composing

Our AI machine-learned Bouguereau’s painting techniques then created a graphical filter that could replicate Bouguereau’s touches, and compose the newly drawn dress to the original painting without discomfort.

The experimental expression gained a high reputation from media.

The number of visitors: 57,800 (103% over last year); Sales: USD 23 million (256% over last year)

Both above reached record volume. ART FAIR TOKYO 2017 was ended on a high note.