Wage Love: Ancestor Dance

Wage Love: Ancestor Dance is a shared augmented reality ritual created for Snap Spectacles that invites participants into a ceremonial space where the past, present, and future converge. Inspired by ancestral wisdom and the urgent need to heal Mother Earth, the experience asks users to reach back—calling forth the spirits of those who came before to move, remember, and transform together.

Participants summon three ancestral beings by speaking the word "Rise". These luminous spirits appear, dance, and offer tokens of love—gifts that orbit the user and represent the strength and guidance of their lineage. As the experience deepens, users place their hands on the Earth, triggering a ritual of connection. The ancestors fuse into a radiant, future-facing being, and participants leave trails of flowers behind them as they move—symbolizing a shared act of healing and remembrance.

The piece was developed during the MIT + Snap Spectacles Community Hackathon at AWE 2025, and was created in collaboration with Lafiya Watson and Dulce Baerga. In June 2025, we entered Wage Love: Ancestral Dance into the Snap Spectacles Community Challenge, and we're thrilled to share that it won 3rd place!

Wage Love: Ancestor Dance was inspired by Sultan Sharrief's ongoing Wage Love project and his exploration of personal lineage through DNA research. The ancestor figures are based on real individuals from Sultan's ancestry.

We used a series of AI tools to generate visual interpretations inspired by those ancestors. We transformed these portraits into stylized 3D models, then brought them to life using motion capture. The project was a deeply collaborative effort that combined cultural research, creative technology, and immersive storytelling to create a ritual experience that is both personal and shared.

We started by developing a storyboard to map out the narrative arc, user flow, and core interactions—establishing how participants would move through the ritual space, summon ancestors, and contribute to the final transformation.

To ground the experience visually and emotionally, we created art direction documents that defined the look, feel, color palette, and material inspiration—blending ancestral textures with Afrofuturist and speculative design references.

From there, we built a prototype to establish the core mechanics: voice activation, gesture recognition, and basic choreography. Once the prototype was functional, we integrated final 3D assets, materials, VFX, and audio to bring the space to life—layering emotion, memory, and movement into a cohesive, immersive ritual.

After AWE, we took some additional time to polish the experience. We added fail-safe interactions (in case the environment is too loud for speech recognition), surface tracking, optional captions, and a number of other visual and technical tweaks.

We root our visuals in the past through organic textures and hand-drawn, 2D renderings that evoke ancestral memory. In contrast, we explore the future with glowing synthetics, geometric forms, and innovative effects—bridging tradition and transformation in a single visual language.

The art direction blends Afrofuturism, collage aesthetics, and ritual symbolism.