JinJie Xu
Artist / Researcher / Activist
Hello! 你好
My name is JinJie, or Jin for short. I am a current Master's student at the School of Information at the University of Michigan. I am also an alumnus of the Stan Richards School of Advertising's Texas Immersive program at UT Austin, studying emerging technology and immersive experiences.
My Work
Interactive Projects
Texas Immersive Experiential Marketing
Experience TXI is an experimental marketing project aimed to promote the Texas Immersive (TXI) program to potential applications among University of Texas’s students. We designed an interactive website where the user goes on a journey inside a futuristic elusive pocket dimension. The players are greeted by three TXI explorers, represented by astronaut-esque line-drawing figures, leaving room for them to imagine exactly what they would look like. Each of the three explorers represents a faction of TXI — luminary, cerebral, and forge. After taking a quiz to find out their own faction, the players then choose to go on a journey led by one of the explorers. As the lead game designer and developer, I led my team to design all the interactive portions of the experience (the quiz, the keypad puzzle, and various Easter eggs) and led the coding and development of each interaction using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
TXI Acceptance Project
As the first cohort of the Texas Immersive (TXI) program, my peers and I set out to design an interactive experience for new cohorts to find out their acceptance into TXI to replace a boring email. We combined immersive storytelling, escape room tactics, and AR technology in order to familiarize our new recruits with buildings they will soon frequent, build the TXI legacy, and to give students a taste of what they will be creating as Explorers. As a member of the builder team, we painted and assembled TXI explored talismans; prototyped a turning-key puzzle; painted and assembled a “cave” ceiling tile; and prototyped a photo booth using a Raspberry Pi. However, due to the impact of the COVID-19 lockdown, we did not get to finish the installation of this on-going project.
Social Rejection Training Project
How Do We Minimize the Negative Influence of Social Rejection? -- Psychology Research Project With Dr. Beer
We face social rejection scenarios every day. Often, we do not have punitive intentions behind our rejections -- often, we are just too busy to have a conversation with a stranger or too tired to hang out with a friend. The project aimed to teach people what rejection language to use to "let people down easy."
We are creating two interactive, "chose-your-own-adventure" games built with Twine to explore various social rejection scenarios. These two games have a continuous narrative -- a study abroad adventure. After the first game, we are showing the player a training video aimed to teach them what language to use in order to minimize the hurt of the rejectee. The second game then measures if the training video was effective.
This is an interactive experience designed for co-workers to better get to know each other through Zoom in these new virtual times. Do you really know your coworkers? The people you’re spending so much time with on a daily basis? This game is designed for coworkers to see if they know each other’s favorite things. Will they be able to guess whose favorite movie is whose? Or will they learn something new about each other?
Interaction Research
This case study looks at how LiDAR can be used in on-location workplaces.
What are the audiences of emerging technology in ride-share services? What do they need and want from emerging technology? This research project aimed to answer these questions.
3D Modeling
A new baking buddy to H-E-B's H‑E‑Buddy
Animations
Artivism
Art as Activism
"Pink's not for girls, blue's not for boys" -- A call to stop seeing colors as gender stereotypes
All of the colors are created equal
Advertising Projects
As the population of nonbinary-identifying individuals grows, there is an increasing need for gender-neutral clothing lines. Urban Outfitters is aimed to be the first major company to have a full gender-neutral clothing line with this inclusion project.
Apple Mood, a mood tracker application for Apple Watch Series 5. The primary target audience for this app is people living with mood disorders. It uses the heart rate tracker and ECG to track one’s emotions and sends notifications of recommended things to do to bring one’s mood back to the baseline.
At the end of 2019, Spotify would need another captivating campaign, extending from the usual "Spotify Wrapped." Playing off of the then-approaching 2020 election, we decided to pose Spotify as a candidate against its competitors in our campaign #StreamSpotify2020.