Burning Man AI robots and underwater dreams

MIRA, an AI robot installation, stood in the windblown Nevada desert at Burning Man. Her face animated emotions that inspired conversations about art, individuality, and assimilation. On the other side of the globe at the Australian National Maritime Museum, kids visiting the Octopus Garden exhibition experienced what it’s like to be an octopus hunting for crabs, camouflaging to escape predators, and even dreaming.

We talked with Vira Pogromska, the freelance animator who animated MIRA, and René Christen, who worked on Octopus Garden as a technical director for creative studio Junior Major, about how they each used Rive for these very different art installations. Here’s what they had to say. 

How a museum turned kids into octopuses

René, who describes himself as a creative technologist, software engineer, and artist, has been creating interactive installations for galleries, museums, and other organizations for nearly 25 years. During that time, he’s seen many tools come and go, most notably Flash, which he loved because it worked so well for developing interactive illustrations and animations. 

Enter Rive, which René sees as a catalyst for the “comeback of illustrative interactivity,” and he increasingly relies on it for personal projects, as well as work with the talented team at Junior Major. 

René and his team at Junior Major developed Octopus Garden in collaboration with environmental mural artist, InkHunter. The installation uses large-scale projections, camera tracking, and piles of soft “pebble” cushions to give parents and kids a fun way to learn about octopuses. 

“Working with InkHunter’s illustrations made Octopus Garden a perfect Rive project,” René recalls, explaining how the team developed Hunt, an interactive crab-catching experience. “We sent visitor tracking data from multiple cameras from my colleague Matt Hughes’ impressive, open-source application PointCaster to a Flutter app I built so kids could use their bodies and the pebble cushions to catch and corral Rive-animated crabs projected onto the floor.”

Rive took things up another notch for Dreams, a part of the exhibition where kids used another series of Flutter apps to create their own octopuses via touchscreen and send them to a much larger projection with other creations. Anyone who wanted to take their creation home could do so by simply scanning a QR code. René recalls. “Any project that gets an ‘I’m proud of you, papa’ from my then four-year-old son is a good project for me,” 

Looking back on the project, he says his team “would have been hard-pressed to achieve such good results without Rive,” partly because it allowed him to create just one asset for the octopus. “Thanks to Rive’s State Machine, kids could make infinite variations by zooming in and out smoothly and crisply. Rive has given me back a powerful way to create illustrative interactives not seen since Flash. One difference this time, though, is the app is a joy to use and so are the APIs.”

Teaching an AI robot how to feel

Rive also plays a crucial role in Vira’s creative process, and she often relies on an array of features, including bones and constraints. Growing up, she was constantly drawing Disney characters and dreaming of being an animator one day, but she also got a master’s degree in computer science and worked for a time as an application developer, web designer, and programmer. 

Having both design and development skills has served her well, and she currently specializes in graphic design, creating and animating characters, props, assets, and UI for mobile games, videos, applications, and websites with several titles already on Google Play. 

“Whether I’m animating an app’s UI components, bringing a character’s emotions and actions to life, creating an interactive game, producing a promotional video, designing a dynamic hero section for a website, or animating logos and icons, Rive's ability to handle animation assets efficiently empowers me to create something amazing every day.”

Vira used Rive’s State Machine, which makes it easy to connect animations and UI to real-time inputs, events, or conditions, for her work on MIRA, which Aliona Kuznetsova and Volodymyr Kuznetsov developed. 

Designer Yana Vokhminova created Mira’s face, and Vira used Rive to animate her features. “Mira is a robot guided by AI, and my mission was to show that a robot can feel emotions — at least Mira can,” Vira recalls. She knew right away she needed to use the State Machine. 

“After creating a series of animations to represent emotions like joy, sadness, fear, confusion, and more, I defined a set of control variables to manage them. The State Machine allowed me to easily establish the conditions I needed for transitions between each emotion, ensuring smooth and contextually appropriate changes.”

Vira also uses Rive to make animations interactive and controllable when clients ask her to adapt their existing Lottie animations. She appreciates how Rive improves her workflow without forcing her to compromise on her favorite way of working — sketching with paper and pencil, creating a vector image in Sketch, and importing it to Rive for animation. “Drawing, creating vector artwork, and animating are my passions, and I strive to work on creating something every day. Rive is a key part of that.” 

Meleah Maynard is a writer and editor in Minneapolis, Minnesota.