Anthesis, an interactive passion flower experience

Anthesis is the time a flower is open and working. This interactive concept follows one grain of pollen into a passion flower, Passiflora caerulea, in five stops: the corona, the anthers, the stigma, the style and the ovary.

Every fact has its source, and the piece marks where the view becomes interpretation.

Built entirely in Rive, including the 3D and the sound. It runs in English and Spanish, on desktop and phone.

The flower should look alive, and look like it is being read in real time. So the camera moves on one continuous route, with no scene changes, and the interface works like an instrument reading the plant.

What you can tap never flickers at rest, and what flickers on its own cannot be tapped. Only touchable parts carry a label chip. A card opens from the part it explains and follows it as the flower turns.

The rail on the right is six rings, one per stop, and its indicator is the pollen grain itself. Each fact carries its source, and once the camera passes through the stigma the piece says so: from there on, it is an interpreted view.

Unfold separates the flower into its layers and turns it into an index: every part with a chip opens its card.

On a phone the same file rearranges itself. The rail lies flat along the bottom, cards dock below the flower, and the sources run as a ticker on the cover.

The flower is a 3D renderer written in WGSL on Rive’s GPU Canvas.

The sound is synthesised live in AnimaScript: an ambient bed, small interface ticks, and a wind that follows the camera’s speed.

The interface and both languages run on view models and data binding, fed by a single content file.

One file adapts to desktop and phone, and it still opens in the Rive Editor.

The flower and the interface move as one. Each stop changes what you see and what you read, so the piece tells the pollen’s journey through the image as much as through the text.

Try it live: anthesis-flower.vercel.app

Botanical facts come from regional floras and published studies, cited in the piece. The interior and the jump in scale are artistic interpretation.