The Phygitals Arrive:
Five AR Sculptures Enter the Museum
Five original 3D sculptural characters, built from decades of accumulated drawing practice, now live in the RSMAD digital collection as interactive 3D works. Each sculpture is rotatable and explorable directly in your browser. Each also exists as a USDZ file, exported directly from Adobe Illustrator, formatted for augmented reality placement in physical space. This is what the phygital era looks like from inside a studio in Brooklyn.
The Collection
Each sculpture below is interactive. Use your mouse or trackpad to rotate and explore the full form of each work.
What Is a Phygital?
The word describes the space where physical and digital genuinely meet rather than merely coexist. These sculptures are phygitals in the most literal sense. Each was originally exported from Adobe Illustrator as USDZ, OBJ, and GLTF files. The GLTF files were then converted to GLB format for web display. The USDZ files, formatted for iOS augmented reality via Apple QuickLook, exist as source files and represent the AR activation layer of this collection, a pathway that will be made publicly accessible as the exhibition develops.
These are not wall pieces. They are not screen objects. They are designed to activate floors, plazas, hallways, and parks. The photographs below were taken in real spaces in Brooklyn during the making of this collection. No staging. No compositing. The sculptures were placed in real environments and photographed there because that is where they belong.
The phygital frame matters because it changes what a collector, viewer, or institution is acquiring. Not an image. Not a screen object. A sculptural presence designed to inhabit any physical space the owner chooses to bring it into.
The Process
Each sculpture began as a flat vector composition in Adobe Illustrator, built from geometric forms accumulated over years of practice. The Illustrator 3D and Materials panel extruded and dimensioned the flat drawings, giving them volume, weight, and shadow. The source files remain the originals.
Each sculpture was exported from Illustrator as USDZ, OBJ, and GLTF files. The GLTF files were then converted to GLB using the gltf-transform command line tool in Terminal. GLB is the binary single-file format that packages all geometry, materials, and textures into one portable file, and is what powers the interactive viewers on this page.
The 3D viewers on this page are powered by the bPlugins 3D Viewer WordPress plugin, which serves the GLB files natively within WordPress. Every sculpture is rotatable, zoomable, and explorable directly in your browser.
Full Tech Stack
Why Phygitals Matter
We are at the beginning of a significant shift in how digital assets are created, experienced, and exchanged. Augmented reality, virtual reality, and mixed reality are not novelties. They are emerging infrastructures for art, design, commerce, entertainment, and education. The phygital object sits at the center of that shift.
For Art and Design
A phygital sculpture is not limited by gallery walls, shipping logistics, or physical material costs. It can be experienced at monumental scale in a public plaza or at intimate scale on a kitchen table. The same file. The same work. Infinite spatial contexts. For artists this fundamentally changes the relationship between the studio and the world.
For Commerce
The ability to place a 3D object in your physical environment before purchasing is already transforming retail. Furniture, fashion, architecture, product design. The phygital layer allows a buyer to experience scale, proportion, and spatial relationship before any transaction occurs. This is not a feature. It is a new standard for how objects are evaluated and acquired.
For Entertainment and Education
Phygital characters and environments can activate any physical space as a stage. A museum floor becomes an exhibition. A classroom becomes a laboratory. A public park becomes a gallery. The barrier between authored digital content and lived physical experience collapses. What remains is pure presence.
For the Digital Asset Market
As AI agents become capable of discovering, evaluating, and transacting digital assets autonomously, the phygital 3D object becomes a new category of asset class. Machine-readable, spatially activatable, provably authored, and transferable. The infrastructure for agent-to-agent commerce in creative work is being built now. These five sculptures are part of that infrastructure.
The process is the provenance. Every decision made in building this collection, from the first Illustrator export to the Terminal command that converted the files, is documented here. That documentation is part of what makes this work meaningful in the emerging economy of digital creative assets.
Ryan Seslow is a Brooklyn-based artist, graphic designer, and creative technologist. He is the founder of the Ryan Seslow Museum of Art and Design and the developer of AREMES, an autonomous agent framework for machine-readable creative commerce. ryanseslow.com