GEMINI is a flying ride about the fear of being reduced to an image shaped by others. Guided by Alma’s recovered diary, riders descend into an underworld formed by the distance between who she is and who she feels she must become to be accepted.
The journey moves through three forms of fear: a ritual promising her desired face, a river exposing hidden shame, and a dance with faceless figures, where the boundary between liberation and self-loss begins to blur. Drawing on Eastern and Western visions of the underworld, GEMINI reframes appearance anxiety as the fear of losing control over how we are seen.
Technology may change the face, but it cannot free us from an internalized gaze.
GEMINI
Tools
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Unreal Engine 5,
Stewart Platform / Ride Simulation,
OSC, Maya, Metahuman,
Motion Capture
My Role
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Director, Camera Operator, Animator, Character & environment Artist
Collaborator & Performer:
Siru Yao
Description
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Gemini is a flying ride aimed at eliciting the essence of the emotion “fear” through the theme of appearance anxiety. Through diving into a world between reality and fantasy, the ride illuminates the anxiety and horror we go through as we try to conform to social standards of beauty.
Concept
Character & Environment Design
Each character and environment gives form to a stage of Alma’s fear. The altar embodies her desperate hope for transformation, while the melted faces suggest the risk of losing herself in the process. A fish-like creature introduces an irrational, dreamlike threat. Marked with surgical correction lines, the faceless figures hover between perfection and erasure, revealing the violence of treating identity as something to be corrected.
3D Modeling, Shading, Rigging
I developed primary characters’ looks and created, rigged, and animated them using Autodesk Maya, with Metahuman’s animations captured through motion capture. Subsequently, I built the environment and lighting within Unreal Engine 5.
Map Design
The ride takes us through the altar, flying from the cliff, across the river, into the jungle on the other side, and finally back to reality, signifying the process of going through fire and high water, only to recognize the recurrence of insatiable desires.
Ride Entrance, Vehicle & Queue Design
In this flying theatre ride experience, the vehicle is made of three circles to create an isolating and immersive effect.The Queue line station of Gemini is a human’s face from the top view, with two lines to get into the station and a robot in front of the screen explaining the background of our journey.
Ride Simulation Max/MSP
We sent data from Unreal Engine to Max and designed the Max nodes to control movements on a Stewart Platform. This section is completed by Siru Yao. Then together we optimizing sound and movement effects based on the testing results.
