AGEPASS - Immersive Meta-Exhibition
DEVELOPMENT TOOLS: Unreal 5, Photoshop, Adobe Premiere, After Effect
AGEPASS is a living system where screening equals computation—an emergent narrative of rules + motives, and an evergreen world operation across venue. A living system where screening equals computation—an emergent narrative of rules + motives, and an evergreen world operation across venues, media, and exhibition cycles.
The Meta-Exhibition brings together two previous completed projects — <AGEPASS> and <The Sun of the 21st Century> (Across 2000) — into a meaningful dialogue. It condenses the transformations in China in past 35 years, alongside the first 24 hours of humanity’s entry into the 21st century across the world into a single poetic moment.
AGEPASS is defined as a living system where “screening equals computation.” The audience are co-authors. By “do first, then understand,” viewers complete a verifiable cognitive judgment. On exhibition site, a 360° multi-screen show-control system carries the immersive main narrative. The interaction layer runs a closed loop—“meme phrase → guided annotation → one-time input → backend multi-agent inference → causal presentation → generate a ‘new AGEPASS’ and project it to the main screens”—so viewers’ choices and expressions are written into the system, co-creating “new AGEPASS.”
The exhibition content includes units like: Water Cloud Atlas (The River of Consciousness), Ours (A Gaze into Psychohistory), Era Expression in the Human Tide (The Emotional Journey of an Era), China's Wind (The Tide of Commerce), the Eternal Moment (Fossils of Time), Phantom Sounds (The Historical Park of Voices), 13.8 Billion Years & One Instant (Worldview)... Together, these units combine archival footage, data visualization, and AIGC-driven interaction to deliver a cause-and-effect experience that audiences can retell, take away, and revisit later via a QR code.
Credits
Meta-Exhibition Executive Director: Zikun Chen
Visual Sample Post Production: Zikun Chen
Scene Interaction Design: Qiang Liu
Environmental Digital Twin & UE5 Virtual Production: Zikun Chen
Music & Sound Design: Zikun Chen
Visual Design & Post- Production: Zikun Chen
Production Lead: Teng Zhang
The full visual sample is available in 50-minute, 30-minute, and 20-minute versions for review, the version below is a 6-minute trailer.
The first phase of the exhibition is staged in the Central Hall of the China National Film Museum. The hall features five giant screens. Rather than functioning as a single stitched mega-display, each screen serves a distinct role—together co-authoring one unified narrative. Five screens guides viewers through a 360° immersive, quasi-holographic virtual space and situated scenes, helping them grasp spatial position and narrative linkage, perceive conceptual spectacles across time and space, and enter philosophical reflection, worldview inquiry, and poetic experience.
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Ring Screen (H 25 m × L 113.04 m; total area ~2,826 m²)
Magnifies major scenes, environments, crowd dynamics, and macro trends to build atmosphere and reveal spacetime correlations.
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Vertical Screen (H 24 m × W 9.5 m; total area ~228 m²)
Carries the main narrative and core content cues, focusing attention on key details. （The screen on the middle）
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Strip Screen (H 3.6 m × L 27 m; total area ~97.2 m²)
Unfolds linear, concrete content and the story panorama; displays time and coordinates; releases short meme phrases at different chapters to lead audiences for interaction.
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Dome Screen (diameter ~32 m; total area ~803.84 m²)
Serves as a “spacetime linkage board,” signaling the logical direction of the narrative and presenting core conceptual imagery; visualizes spacetime connections and trajectories of spatial migration, rendering the content’s spacetime enactment as a poetic visual metaphor.
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Floor Screen (diameter ~36 m; total area ~695 m²)
Magnifies major scenes and environments; uses directional flow and velocity to build atmosphere and express spacetime correlations; guides viewers’sight and bodily orientation through setting of the content.
For more details on the exhibition’s interaction design, chapter-by-chapter breakdown, and the broader overview of the AGEPASS project, please refer to this document.
Visual Sample Production Process
1. Build the digital-twin of the exhibition hall based on the CAD map, and calibrate the position, scale, and proportions of five screens to match the real exhibition hall.
Adjust the proportion in Unreal Engine
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Map for Each Screen from the Curator
Floor Screen
Vertical Screen
Dome Screen
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Ring Screen
Strip Screen
2. Based on that, map the test footage onto the five screens, adjusting cropping, scaling, and layout per screen to ensure consistent aspect ratios (no stretching) and seamless cross-screen continuity.
Adjust the Time Sign Chapter in UE
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3. Lock the validated five-screen layout into five reusable “templates” (standard screen placement and ratio rules) as the unified standard for all subsequent editing and outputs.
Put video into the Template
Editing Timeline of the Video
5. After completing the editing for a chapter(Content on five screens), put these contents on the corresponding screens in Virtual Exhibition hall for overall pacing and review; finalize all chapters through an “edit → playback → revise” loop.
Export Video and put them in UE
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6. Once all chapters are complete, using key frames to design the camera movement based on narrative rhythm for each chapter, then export image sequences via Movie Render Queue for post-production.
Set the Key Frame in UE
7. Import the rendered image sequences into Premiere Pro for final editing and compositing, add music and sound effects, and complete the Visual Sample for the AGEPASS project.
Final Time Line of the Visual Sample
About the China National Film Museum
The China National Film Museum is currently the world’s largest national-level film museum. It officially opened to the public on February 10, 2007. Covering nearly 38,000 square meters, it houses 21 exhibition halls and six screening theaters, including a grand theater with Beijing’s largest IMAX screen and a capacity of over 1,000 viewers.
Map of China National Film Museum
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