THE EXPERIENCE
Beyond Frame is an immersive interactive experience that invites visitors to step through the frame of a painting and become part of the artwork.
Using camera-based body detection and image processing, Beyond Frame separates visitors from their surroundings and transforms their appearance to blend naturally with the visual style of the selected painting. Visitors are composed between layers of the artwork, creating the illusion of standing inside the painted world rather than simply in front of a screen.
As visitors move, elements within the painting respond subtly to their presence. Foreground objects overlap their bodies, environmental details shift, and interactions emerge through movement and position. The experience concludes with a personalized image capturing the visitor inside the artwork.
Beyond Frame transforms viewing art into an experience of entering it.
PROJECT SUMMARY
Beyond the Frame explores how audiences can move from simply looking at a landscape painting to experiencing its atmosphere as a physical and immersive environment.
Using selected landscape paintings as the visual and conceptual foundation, the project extends the artwork beyond the two-dimensional frame through projection, spatial sound, lighting, and interactive technologies.
Rather than altering the original painting, the experience focuses on translating and expanding its existing qualities—such as weather, time of day, depth, movement, sound, and emotional atmosphere—into the surrounding physical space.
The audience is no longer positioned only as an observer standing outside the artwork. Instead, they are invited to enter a spatial interpretation of the painting and experience its environment through sight, sound, and physical presence.
At the end of the experience, the digital and immersive encounter returns to a physical medium through a printed takeaway, creating a tangible connection between the visitor, the artwork, and the museum experience.
Through this transition from 2D painting → immersive space → audience experience → physical print, Beyond the Frame aims to create a new way of engaging with traditional landscape art while respecting the original work.
THE PROCESS
1
2D Painting
2
Immersive Space
3
Audience Experience
4
Physical Print
PROJECT GOALS
Transform the experience of viewing a landscape painting into an immersive spatial encounter.
Extend the atmosphere of the original artwork through projection, spatial sound, lighting, and environmental design.
Allow audiences to experience the painting through physical presence rather than observation alone.
Preserve the artistic integrity of the original work while exploring how its visual and emotional qualities can exist beyond the frame.
Connect the immersive digital experience back to physical print, giving visitors a tangible object to take away from the experience.
This project’s client is Stephen Leon, Adjunct Faculty and 2D Lab Manager at the School of Design, Carnegie Mellon University.