ArtSync

Lopez, Lydia; Bhagwat, Rahul; Lance, Christian; Boylson, Joe

Student Work

ArtSync Open Access Deposited

Analytics

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Date Uploaded: 09/14/2023
Date Modified: 09/14/2023

This team of web and game developers came together through a common desire to build a
product that was both an immersive experience and a tool accessible through a common web
browser. The team identified a problem that content creators are now facing due to the closure
of art galleries and because many experiences are now becoming virtualized, an opportunity in
the market was identified. Furthermore, there was personal motivation for some members of
the team to build the product that they themselves wanted to use for their own artistic
endeavors. This is how and why the team decided to build ArtSync, a virtual gallery
environment which will allow artists to showcase their work and share it across the internet.
ArtSync is made up of two main parts: a game built inside Unity and a website which has access
to a database. The Unity game contains the 3D realistic environment, the movement controls,
the rendering of artwork, and the different actions to view the art. The website takes care of
the other elements that a user experiences: authentication, file uploading, gallery
management, and permissions. Separately, both parts are interesting enough; but by
integrating these two parts together, the team created something unique.
To embed the game inside the website, the team used Unity's WebGL exporter which bundles
the project into something that a web browser can read. The product sends data back and forth
from the Unity export through the use of an open-source JavaScript library called react-unitywebgl
and custom javascript events. With these methods, the team fully integrated the Unity
game with the website and database into one cohesive product.
As a result, the team created a scene build inside Unity with all the controls functional, a basic
front-end built out with React, and the basic construction of an API which reads and writes from
a local SQLite database. With that, the team also created two use cases, technical diagrams and
documentation, and the creation of the front end.
The team first created a proof-of-concept product which proved that the idea was absolutely
possible and would not require a great amount of resources or extremely high technical
proficiency. By this point, the team has worked out all the major issues of the project and
moved forward into the enhancement stage where the team turned this app from a proof-ofconcept
into an alpha release.