"My dream is that the entire world is turned into a Park…This Park should be like this Landscape Park, Man and Nature so perfectly combined." ( Interview with Dimitriy Sergeevich Likhachev discussing the parks surrounding Tsarskoye Selo, Russia)

Rutopia is a virtual reality art project developed for the CAVE, GeoWall, passive and active stereo projection. It describes an ideal garden, a fairy Park, which shows a unity of technology, man, and nature. Its visual style is based on poetics and symbology from Russian fairy tales and Russian folk art. In Rutopia trees communicate with the visitor of the park, and their growth depends on his proximity. They are symbols of interaction, intelligent transmitters that form the environment, flip the time, transform perspectives, and conduct the presentations of the garden.
The visitor can rotate the garden around himself to watch and hear the trees growing from the different angles and perspectives. The visitor can control the evolution of the trees as well as reverse their growth to see it backwards.

The creative goal was to explore the aesthetics of virtual art in its relationship to the art of painting. All elements, objects and textures in this project were first hand-painted in a variety of details and sizes on the paper using gouache colors. The 3D models based on the storyboard visuals were built using Maya 5 package. The textures for each model were painted individually, scanned, and applied to the 3D objects.

In this yet fairy environment, rationalistic technology, mystery of nature and human presence are harmonized in a perfect balance. Rutopia shows this interactive virtual park as a sketch of a premature embodiment of this wonderful time and place.