AR Experience Interaction Design HoloLens 2

Adobe × David Bowie:
an iconic stage costume, life-size in AR

Intro

For Future of Creativity, Adobe’s event in Berlin and its first in-person live event since the pandemic, we marked David Bowie’s 75th birthday by rebuilding his iconic Ziggy Stardust-era stage costume as a life-size hologram that visitors could walk around, grab and move with their bare hands.

Built with the innovation agency Future Candy; my part: the interaction design and the spatial choreography that made a museum piece touchable.

Visitors wore a HoloLens 2 and handled the costume with a pinch: no controller, no screen, nothing to read first.

Most of them had never worn a headset before, so the interaction had to teach itself in the first thirty seconds.

Role
Interaction Designer
Client
Adobe
Agency
Future Candy
Event
Future of Creativity · Berlin
Tools
Adobe Substance 3D DesignerAdobe DimensionBlender

The idea: a museum costume, life-size and in your hands

Bowie’s stage costumes are locked behind museum glass. You can look, but never get closer than the barrier allows. The installation flipped that: a faithful 3D reconstruction of the costume floats on the exhibition floor at full scale, and visitors grab it, turn it and move it through the space with nothing but their hands. The costume design itself stays untouched; what changes is how close you can get to it.

Point-of-view through the HoloLens: a hand pinching to restyle the floating Bowie costume
Through the headset: pinch, and the costume follows your hand.

Spatial design: the floor plan as the wireframe

In AR the floor plan is the wireframe. The experience ran twice on the exhibition floor, so we mapped both areas before designing a single interaction: where a visitor enters, where the hologram anchors, how close people can get before the illusion breaks, and where a facilitator stands without stealing the moment. A support display mirrors the headset view so waiting visitors become an audience instead of a queue.

Floor plan of the installation showing visitor path, interaction zone and exits
The experience as a floor plan: entry, briefing spot, interaction zone, exit.
Annotated photo of the installation: headset, interaction zone, support display, facilitator, visitor movement
The five moving parts on site: headset, interaction zone, support display, facilitator, visitor flow.

Interaction: self-explaining in the first thirty seconds

Most visitors had never worn a HoloLens. The interaction had to teach itself in the first half minute: the costume appears, a soft outline invites a closer look, a glowing ring marks where a pinch will land. Pinch, and the costume follows your hand. Every step gives a reward before asking for the next gesture.

Six-step sequence: putting on the headset, the costume appearing, highlighting, selecting and moving
The arc of the experience: put on the headset → meet the costume → highlight → select → move.

The costume: a 3D asset that holds up at arm’s length

The costume was rebuilt as a proper 3D asset, modelled, surfaced and lit so it reads as vinyl and lacquer, not as a game prop. Visitors could bring it right up to their eyes, so seams, surfaces and reflections had to survive close inspection while the fit and drape stayed true to the original.

Four stages of the costume asset: wireframe, clay, textured black vinyl, lit with neon accents
Wireframe → clay → textured → lit: the same silhouette at four stages of the build.

The best compliment on site: visitors reaching out to feel a fabric that wasn’t there.

Learnings: onboarding in space, designing for spectators, forgiving gestures

  • Onboard in the world, not in a menu. Every instruction that could be an object in space (a glow, a ring, an outline) worked better than any text panel.
  • Design for the people not wearing the headset. The support display turned a solo gadget demo into a shared moment; spectators queued to try what they had just watched.
  • Forgive imprecise gestures. Generous hit targets and a facilitator’s single calibration sentence (“pinch like you’re picking a grape”) cut failed interactions dramatically.