Tentacus

2025
by Yiyang Sun, Ziying Chen, La Luo, Botao Hu








Overview
Tentacus is a mixed reality ritual that explores decentralized intelligence and collective embodiment, where eachdancer becomes a tentacle by wearing soft-textile gloves with embedded smartphones that function as both sensors andactuators. They negotiate movement through connection to a circular ring, becoming a collective, fluid tentacular being.


The glove mimics an octopus tentacle, crafted fromsoft textile with lightweight cotton lining for natural touchand flexibility. A smartphone is mounted beneath the palmwith its LiDAR scanner exposed to capture the surroundingenvironment.

Pectator Journey: The site is pre-scanned using a smartphonewith LiDAR and reconstructed using 3D Gaussian splatting technology. During the performance, all smartphoneon tentacles transmit 6-DoF spatial pose tracking and proximitvsignals to a centralized server that generates real-time glowingluminous point-cloud traces rendered on a public display. Whe!tentacles brush terrain, contacts bloom as glowing points that decavover time. The public spectators can witness Tentacus sensing and remembering, externalized as a shared visual memory.





Exhibitions
SIGGRAPH ASIA. 2025. HongKong, China
UNITE 2025. Shanghai, China