What is the Funiki project?
Funiki (ふんいき) in Japanese means atmosphere, mood, ambiance, aura, or feel. This word captures the spirit of the project.
The project focuses on creating dynamic immersive ambiences using lights and sounds that can be used to immerse people in activities such as: tabletop role playing games, social gatherings and moments of personal relaxation.
Funiki is a long horizon research project. It doesn’t have specific long-term goals or deliverables but rather a mission and an evolving direction with exploratory outputs along the way.
You can find examples of exploratory outputs on the website. We recommend you start with The Lighthouse demo which explores the use of Funiki in a role playing game setting.
The Digital Garden
This is the companion website for the Funiki project. A research project at Sony CSL Paris lead by Michael Anslow. This site is a digital garden: a living collection of ideas, sketches, experiments, and reflections. The idea is to share the project as it matures rather than only presenting complete outputs.
Mission
Beyond the specific details of the project, our the broad mission is:
To transform static spaces into immersive ambient experiences.
For everyone in everyday spaces.
Concretely, that means we try to focus on everyday contexts and people rather than professional people in professional spaces.
One of the longterm goals is for anyone to vibe ambiences using multimodal prompts (text + images + video + audio) and construct ambiences from this to support creative activities.
Teaser
The project is still fairly early on in it’s (undetermined) lifecycle. We will be playing around and outputing content regularly. (See Creation 👈).