AR Guided Tour App

Presently, Old Government House (OGH) is located within a university campus adjacent to city gardens. There are tours offered, however many visitors casually drop in outside of them. The house also has three main purposes: a gallery, event space and house museum. Because of this, most of the rooms are unfurnished and do not contain information within them. This makes the casual visitor experience difficult, as they can only see the current state of the house, not understanding its significance and multiple histories. To make matters worse, modern visitors also have a limited interest in reading what information is available along the entrance walls and within brochures. The resulting experience regarding the house’s history, is as a quick glance while walking through the various rooms.
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There is however, significant history within the walls of the house. It was the centre of Queensland’s governance for roughly 50 years after its inception. With the building representing different things to different cultures and backgrounds. While this makes it interesting, it also makes it quite a complex story to convey to a casual visitor.

The approach used to research and define the project involved aspects of design thinking and art thinking. Design thinking looked at the problems associated with the visitor experience. Including researching and understanding the space, conducting ethnographic and proxemic studies. Gaining an understanding from a visitor’s point of view and understanding what the curator wanted people to come away with. Visitors had little contextual information as they walked through the house and could only see the room as it looked in the current day. The curator, meanwhile, wanted visitors to realise the multiple aspects of history the house witnessed and to really understand the grander that the house represented at the time of its use. These aspects could be conveyed during house tours, which people enjoyed, but was completely lost on the casual visitor. A varied collection of different experiences and theories was collected to use as a base for a solution. During this time, an art thinking approach was also used. This allowed the focus to shift, less on the problems and more on a bigger picture, thinking about what the expression of the experience could be. Leading towards a visitor experience that was about coming into a story, being immersed in a different time, with drama and emotion.  

The solution involved creating an mobile AR app prototype that delivered a storytelling experience inspired by theatre, site-specific performance, narrative adventure games, audio tours, sound installations and locative media. A visitor uses a downloadable app to access interactions with virtual characters within the house. They are invited to an virtual event (based on history) which involves them moving around the main rooms of the house using a mobile phone with headphones. When a visitors reaches a destination position the next scene is activated and they  

The completed high-fidelity prototype, Skullduggery at Old Government House, was play-tested on-site with six random visitors who were all members of the local visitor type. The focus of the play test was to gain insights into the potential value of the adventure game approach in the context of the specific cultural heritage site and so a qualitative approach was taken in order to collect some general experiential feedback.  The responses from the visitors indicated that the major project goals were met, nearly all the participants mentioned that they enjoyed the story aspect (“You hear the stories, this feeds the imagination in a room”), and felt it added a level of direct engagement, understanding and connection with the spaces. However, the testing also highlighted elements that should be incorporated into this type of experience. With play testers wanting to have some hard facts about the location also delivered in some manner.

An overview of the experience was presented to help explain the experience to stakeholders and potential visitors. This was done by presenting a floor-plan of Old Government House, which displayed images of scenes within the experience, along with music and an iPad. Viewers were motioned to to point the iPad at each displayed image scene, which triggers the video that appears when people move through Old Government House. This was received very positively and viewers were excited to be able to interact with a real AR experience within Old Government House.

The problem remains similar to the initial issue of engaging casual visitors to Old Government House (OGH). However, OGH also wanted to tell more diverse stories in its space. The rich storytelling potentials of AR was something that wanted to be explored. It was decided that an experience was to be created, which would deliver foundational knowledge of the house - that of its colonial past. And at a later date, more challenging narratives

To develop an AR experience, it is important to determine what elements the AR experience can best convey. This involves taking the factual and emotional elements that want to be communicated and think about what kind of medium would suit each part.  I could then begin to determine what the app itself has the potential to convey and what elements the AR experience should focus on. From this process two main characters, five side characters and interactive objects were developed. Along with this, other media types and touchpoints were identified as having the ability to integrate the experience with deeper knowledge for visitors.

The technology used for this project is building upon previous experiences that have been developed. With the addition of triggerless activation points (doesn't require scanning codes), that help make a seamless experience for visitors. This has introduced some extra considerations in the development of an experience.
This project involves pushing the bounds of how an AR experience is delivered to visitors. With many considerations to be taken. An AR experience needs to involve not only a digital screen, but also the physical world and all of its complexities.

This is an ongoing project and I am currently in the process of designing some unique AR interactions.

This is the most complex experience I have created to date. Prototyping this type of AR experience is quite new and difficult. However, I have begun to experiment on ways that I can prototype the experience for stakeholders to get updates and to play with the design in a less time intensive way.