AR Portal

“What if you could step through a portal and explore an alternate world or take a stroll through a poem depicted as work of art?” This was the burning question behind an experiment to craft an Augmented Reality experience for a night at the museum.

THE CHALLENGE

Our team wanted to make an immersive experience, for a themed event based on tech culture and innovation. In the time frame of two weeks, we collaborated to bring our ideas to fruition. Our first objective was to engage in cross disciplinary collaboration and create in a mixed reality space. Our second objective was to have a tangible outcome that would showcase our skillsets, namely software development, user experience and illustration.

THE APPROACH

Taking a cue from the utopian poem, “Machines of Loving Grace”, we landed upon a concept that we hoped would illuminate the co-existence and inter-dependance of nature and technology. We understood from the onset that we would have to practice thinking through different lenses. By asking people to play with the app at various stages, we were able to gather qualitative insights on how they actually used it and what their pain points were.

THE OUTCOME

The app was created through an intentionally rapid iterative process. We would come together after work hours to share ideas and choreograph the way we wanted users to interact with the app. Through white-boarding sessions, brainstorming, sketching and prototyping, we worked through our ideas and landed on a visual , tactical and technical direction. We utilised common platforms to build the app, Unity for the architecture and Blender for the enhanced graphics. At the event, we provided devices that had the beta version installed, as well as guidance to users that had limited or no history of interacting with mixed reality. Partaking in this experiment provided insight on how to approach collaboration differently and how to execute a beta version of an app in limited time.