Andrea Aste
Oracolarium
oracle deck
Augmented Reality deck
Illustrations: Andrea Aste
Design: Andrea Aste
Authors: Andrea Aste, Neil Kelso
Publisher: Berith&Brimstone, London, 2020
Oracolarium is an intuitive oracle deck which connects the world of divination and story telling; it is the first game of this kind whose cards come to life when viewed through a smartphone thanks to Augmented Reality technology.
It was a great challenge, first, to create the rules of the game making everything working as we wanted and, second, to give the project the right graphic.
I mixed different techniques (photography with green screen, inks, gouache, digital illustration) drawing in a “modular way” to allow every illustration to be animated in stop motion.
The Box and the Booklet
Both come to life with AR animations and have a very special shape: a triangle, a reference to the traditional way of representing the divinity as an eye inscribed inside a triangle (Oracoalrium is an oracle deck, after all!). This create interesting challenging in the designing process, but I really love when I can explore uncharted lands!
The triangular pages are designed with different orientations of the text, in such a way that one has to playfully turn the book in order to read it.
We worked on this dream project for 5 years with countless hours of research, experimenting and testing and finally we launched Oracolarium on Kickstarter in January 2020, achieving full funding in just a few days!
Since launching it has been featured in several magazines and blogs:
“an impressive artistic achievement ... a mesmerising cinematic experience” by technology and futurism blog BoingBoing
