Draw to Search: An AI Art Discovery Kiosk for MAP
An interactive art installation that ditches the keyboard. You draw a shape, and AI image recognition finds the paintings that match.
Project Overview
Searching for art usually means knowing the right words: the title, the artist, the period. But what if all you remember is a curve, a spiral, a particular shape? ViitorX built a Shape and Pattern Search kiosk for the Museum of Art and Photography, whose collection runs to more than 20,000 artworks, that lets visitors do exactly that. You draw the shape you are looking for, and an AI engine surfaces the paintings that contain it. Built as a Unity app, it replaces the search box with a sketch pad and turns finding art into a game of visual curiosity.
Objective
MAP wanted a playful new way into its collection, one that needed no prior knowledge. The kiosk set out to:
- Let visitors search the collection by drawing a shape rather than typing words.
- Return genuinely relevant paintings based on the patterns a visitor sketches.
- Make art exploration feel like discovery, for experts and first-timers alike.
- Teach visitors about styles and movements through the shapes that define them.
Challenges
Search-by-drawing is a deceptively hard thing to make feel simple:
- Matching a rough hand-drawn shape to real artworks demands accurate image recognition.
- The experience had to delight casual visitors, not just satisfy art scholars.
- Results needed to feel relevant instantly, or the magic would fade.
- A public kiosk had to stay responsive while doing real visual analysis.
Solutions
We built the experience around one bold idea, draw instead of type, then made the AI earn it. It includes:
- Draw-to-search input: Visitors sketch a shape directly on the interactive kiosk, skipping keywords and descriptions entirely.
- Shape-based image recognition: An AI engine analyses the drawing and returns paintings whose forms genuinely match, the heart of the visual search.
- An immersive Unity app: The whole experience runs in a responsive, engaging Unity build designed for a busy gallery floor.
- A learning layer: As visitors explore by shape, they discover the styles and movements behind the art, turning play into quiet education.
Where It Delivers Value
For a museum, this is more than a clever toy. It lowers the barrier to a digital museum collection for anyone who cannot name what they are looking for, draws younger and casual visitors into deeper exploration, and shows how thoughtfully applied AI, rather than ai art for its own sake, can make heritage genuinely more discoverable.
Results & Impact
- Lets visitors search a 20,000-artwork collection by drawing a shape on an interactive kiosk.
- Uses shape-based image recognition to return genuinely relevant paintings.
- Replaces keyword search with an intuitive, playful visual search.
- Runs as a responsive Unity app built for a busy gallery floor.
- Teaches art styles and movements through the act of exploring by shape.
Conclusion
Not every visitor arrives knowing what they want to find, and that is exactly who this is for. By letting people draw their way into MAP’s collection, ViitorX turned search into play and made a digital museum feel genuinely inviting. Sometimes the most natural interface is not a keyboard at all. It is a fingertip and a shape.
Let’s Create
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