Red The Ocean Around U

Billy was the lead developer and technical architect for the frontend and backend of the computational art project Red The Ocean Around U. The project was created by CROSSLUCID and commissioned by LAS Art Foundation. The visual design for the site was led by Felix Luke.

"Red the Ocean Around U proposes a non-linear narrative through an interactive and generative digital environment. The visitors are invited to participate on a journey through those oneiric landscapes, which will lead them to multiple endings. No pathway is the same. The story grows with their interactions. The visitor becomes U, a character who has to decide whether to adopt or return two stolen creatures. U is guided by the questions of Claude, an otherworldly character, itself a Large Language Model (LLM)." - LAS Art Foundation

The site presents several pre-generated videos by CROSSLUCID, with the core of the project in the "Healing Spring", which generates an evolving AI environment in the browser in real-time. The experience is shared, with all users receiving a live feed of the environment, driven by communal interactions with the website.

The website was developed using Next.js, RunPod, Three.js, and Supabase.

The project involved close collaboration with CROSSLUCID to deploy a custom serverless AI image generator for their AI image generation workflow. The AI is fed many user inputs from the front-end to drive the image generation. It has several short-term and long-term memories, containing various texts and symbols, which accumulate over the project's lifetime.

There is a unique downloadable PDF version of the narrative arc of the users journey at the end of the user journey.