Time: 09/12-09/18

¼ Quarter Walkaround:

At ETC, ¼ quarter walkaround is a collective review session by 20 faculty and staff to learn about every project and give feedback during the project initiation planning phase. Although this semester has around 15 weeks, the quarter walkaround was arranged one week earlier than before. Thanks to our instructors, external advisors, and clients, we were able to arrange a few in-person and online meetings in the first 2 weeks to put out a feasible plan before the walkaround. Our goals are to create a proof-of-concept prototype with Web AR and launch it in the archive, which would help raise funds later for a more comprehensive product. 

Three challenges we need help with in the early stage include:

1. How to balance AR during tours with a real tour guide because AR should not interrupt the tour or distract visitors? In short, how to make a cohesive and seamless AR experience?
2. How to incorporate Ozzie’s (Director of Archive) archival knowledge into AR interactions? How do we convey the underlying social, aesthetic, and political background context from the original shows through AR to the visitors?
3. How do we select items from the archive for the prototype taking into account of 7 stakeholders and copyright issues?

To facilitate understanding of our prototype, we listed 4 different types of AR experiences involving La MaMa’s historical buildings, posters and photographs, show puppets, and costumes.

For more information, please review the presentation slides attached below.

We presented the slides to 6 groups of faculty and staff and overall, our project goals and deliverables were perceived as clear and easy to understand. More past projects and existing museum exhibits were recommended for reference as below.

• Previous projects
  • Molten corps
  • Archive Dive – History Maker
  • Marioneta (Kinect)
  • ARena
• Other use cases and tech
  • Synthetic interviews
  • Holoportation
  • National Comedy Museum, NY
    • Costume filter
  • Carnegie Museum of History
    • They showed more of what visitors didn’t see

Production:

Team bonding was this week! We headed to a local BBQ restaurant and relaxed for the afternoon after the walkaround.

Next week, we will visit NYC to tour the archive and interview La MaMa’s stakeholders in person. Preparation for this trip is ongoing.

Design:

Jingyuan worked on the UX prototype (Flow 2 in Figma) to show the user experience flow of our web AR product.

For details of each experience, please refer back to the slides above.

Art/UI:

Our half-sheet and poster drafts were created Yutian.

Programming:

Bokang programmed and tested 2 prototypes of a face filter and virtual portal.