Students from the Anthropocene XR lab led by Professors Jung Choi and Xin Tong have been invited to present their research project, “GestoBrush: Facilitating Graffiti Artists’ Digital Creation Experiences through Embodied AR Interactions,” at VINCI 2025, the International Symposium on Visual Computing and Interactive Media, which will take place in Linz, Austria.
VINCI is a peer-reviewed international conference that brings together researchers working at the intersection of interactive media, visual computing, and digital cultural practices. The team—Ruiqi Chen (Class of 2024, now at University of Washington), Qingyang He (Class of 2024, now at Berklee College of Music), and Hanxi Bao (Class of 2025, currently at Harvard)—developed GestoBrush, a mobile AR prototype that transforms smartphones into virtual brushes, allowing community members to create situated digital markings through embodied, gesture-based interactions. Rather than treating graffiti solely as an individual artistic practice, the project frames it as a collective communicative form that shapes how publics engage with shared spaces. Responding to increasing restrictions on physical graffiti and the limited affordances of existing digital platforms, the study highlights how embodied spatial engagement remains central to graffiti’s expressive and social function. The findings show that embodied AR tools can enable communities to co-author public meaning, preserve the cultural ethos of street expression, and expand its possibilities into hybrid physical–digital environments. The project was supported by the Humanities Research Center (HRC) and will appear in the VINCI 2025 conference proceedings.
