LUNA OS
LUNA OS is JMGO's in-house dual-mode operating system, released in 2021, with a standard viewing mode and a DIY companion mode. When playback isn't needed, users switch from classic mode to companion mode with one tap. Companion mode offers a range of wall surfaces with different functions: a customizable info dashboard, themed weather, a clock, personalized DIY, music-reactive visuals, and more. Its guiding direction is a borderless design that blends naturally into the wall. (See the LUNA OS site for details.)
As LUNA OS's launch AR theme, it had to emphasize melting into the wall. While working out the 3D theme early on, I concluded it should follow a glasses-free 3D visual direction while also delivering a glasses-free AR effect.
Projectors are demanding about image granularity — even traditional 1080p HD is often pixel-shifted up from 720p. So I imagined filling every pixel of the projected 720p frame with tens of thousands of model particles, each churning slowly and gracefully up and down within the frame, so the upper half appears to extend outward as an AR effect. The result turned out well and confirmed my hunch: just as 2K/4K monitors can't display 1080p video perfectly, a native 1080p panel always plays HD sources more crisply than a 2K-or-higher one — a matter of the display controller's tuning, which can't downscale cleanly and fill every pixel.
After a long stretch of thinking and design reasoning, plus continuous visual trial-and-error across several drafts, I arrived at a relatively unified solution.
(See the full project on Behance.)