Category: Dev Blogs

Overview

• Field Trip: National Road Museum
• Historical AR Research
• Niantic SDK Experimentation
• Storyboards
• Challenges
• Next Week’s Goals

Field Trip: National Road Museum

This week began with an exciting field trip across state lines to the National Road & Zane Grey Museum in Ohio! There, we got a crash course on the history of the National Road and the evolution of transportation in the United States from the very knowledgeable Betsy Taylor.

The museum has a very impressive diorama spanning over 100 feet long which represents over 700 miles of road across more than a century of growth and change. The dioramas—all hand-painted and sculpted—tell a compelling story of who was traveling across the road over the years and the types of buildings and towns that emerged to support commerce and traffic. Supplementing the dioramas are real examples of the vehicles used to traverse the road, including the iconic Conestoga wagon, along with early automobiles and bicycles before the invention of the bike chain. The charm of the dioramas and the surprise of witnessing the true scale of the real historical artifacts are emotions we want to capture with our project.

On the way to and from the museum, we also got to briefly stop by an S-bridge, which is a type of structure built to connect segments of the road that were not fully aligned on either side of a river—these were common since the National Road was built in small, disjoint portions rather than as one continuous stretch. We also saw sections of National Route 40, the modern legacy of this history.

Historical AR Research

We began researching existing augmented reality applications, particularly ones that had historical premises or otherwise were part of educational projects. One experience recommended to us by our project instructor, Mike, is the Gettysburg AR Experience which displays notable scenes from the Civil War (like the Battle of Gettysburg and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address) in life-scale AR. We want to take inspiration from the immersive nature of rendering large artifacts right in front of a player, which they can interact with through their screens.

We also found our own examples and evaluated what features made AR a unique medium which we should try to incorporate into our design. A lot of historical examples that we looked at either opted to render—or project a rendering onto—one artifact at a time, which players could walk around and see from many angles. Alternatively, some experiences were very heavily tied to a specific location. With our design, we wanted to try something unique from these examples that we found because we want to give users more freedom to experience our app from many locations while still seeing some artifacts, like wagons and buildings, that are very large in life-scale.

Niantic SDK Experimentation

The team got access to 4 Android phones that we could use to test and run our builds, and we began experimenting with the Niantic SDK to see what it was capable of. The main feature we were most interested in was the semantic layer detection, so that we can render life-scale objects based on where the road or ground is that a player is standing on. We found that Niantic supports both highlighting the semantic layers on UI canvases and also generating mesh objects that can be textured to look like a road.

Storyboards

We met with Jesse Schell last Friday to discuss storyboarding and get his advice for designing virtual reality and augmented reality experiences. This week, we pursued his advice in brainstorming, and we separately listed out a lot of possible learning and/or transformational outcomes, interesting experiences, and cool features of AR as a launching-off point for us to pick the elements that we are most interested in.

Based on our visit to the museum and our brainstorming process, we created a storyboard of an experience with 4 stages, the first three dedicated to showing short segments of the National Road’s progression while being constructed, and the final one being longer and showing a developed town along the road. We came up with interactions and achievements that would progress the levels, such as cutting down trees to clear a path for the road, building an S-bridge to cross a river, and building a tollhouse once the road’s construction was nearly finished. We will continue refining this design, so that we can receive feedback from faculty at Quarters next week.

Challenges

The main challenge of this week was simultaneously researching the history of the National Road and the capabilities of AR technology and then combining all of our findings into a design that matches our project goals.

Next Week’s Goals

• Preparing for Quarters presentation on Wednesday
• Synthesize Quarters feedback and decide on a solid direction to begin prototyping
• Prepare to attend Transformational Design Workshop
• Reach out to Portals Project to request relevant their 3D models from scans
• Begin working on fast sprints for prototyping to see what works

Overview

• Project Kickoff
• Research & Brainstorming
• Composition Box
• Challenges
• Next Week’s Goals

Project Kickoff

We’re excited to be kicking off our project! The requirements are very open-ended, and there’s no preconceived notion of what this project will become. Our only constraints are that we make

1. an augmented reality application for phones (preferably using Niantic’s SDK), which
2. is centered around the historic National Road.

While we don’t have a specific client for our project, we plan to contact and visit local organizations that have done relevant work, such as the National Road Museum in Zanesville, Ohio, Searight’s Tollhouse in Fayette County, and the Perennial Project in Brownsville, Pennsylvania, which captures 3D scans of historical buildings.

Research & Brainstorming

The team started researching and brainstorming possible settings and AR interactions that could get an unfamiliar player invested in the topic of the National Road. We wanted to find some interesting stories about the National Road as well as learn about how to design good AR experiences, especially ones that are historical and educational.

What is the National Road, anyway? It was the first federally-funded highway in the United States, with construction spanning from 1811 to 1837, which connected Cumberland, Maryland, on the Potomac River to Vandalia, Illinois, and facilitated westward travel for thousands of Americans. The current U.S. Route 40 is the lasting legacy of this highway. During the decades of its development, as well as the subsequent decades of evolving transportation, the road transformed from a footpath cleared entirely by manual labor to a vital source of commerce fueling the prosperity of many cities that popped up along its path. In the experience we are building, we want to capture this progression and evolution and show how this road shaped a nation and its people, and vice versa.

Why use augmented reality and Niantic’s spatial platform? The National Road Museum is a wonderful educational attraction that uses charming and beautiful hand-painted dioramas to showcase the road in all of its glory, with knowledgeable facilitators who can share stories and answer questions. However, one goal of this project is to explore more futuristic methods of communicating history, using devices that almost every person has on them all the time. AR allows us to turn a phone into a portal through both time and space, and it can show people historical artifacts with the proper sense of scale, making players feel like they can directly see and interact with objects from a different time as close to physically interacting with them as possible. Niantic’s SDK is particularly good at detecting different semantic layers, such as ground, foliage, buildings, and sky, so we can use this feature to render the actual road itself and show how it changed over time.

Composition Box

We finished out the week by completing a composition box and attending the Playtest to Explore workshop to get some feedback on our initial ideas. We wanted to target our app to teenagers aged 12-16, who might be learning about American history in school and potentially visiting stops along the National Road, including the museum. These were some of our player experience goals:

• Let the player experience the life of Americans along the National Road by visually presenting the buildings and environment around the road.
• Players will come away with a better understanding of the history and culture of the National Road across the decades of its development.
• Players should feel like they embody their role as someone who lives in this time and place in history.

During the workshop, we asked our peers what they thought was the most interesting part of life in early 1800s America as people were moving west, and the responses we received centered around interesting anecdotes about the time and learning about how the modern cities we know today were different in that time.

Challenges

The biggest challenges of the week were synthesizing all of the new research and information we learned and coming up with a direction and goals for what we are going to build over the next few weeks.

Next Week’s Goals

• Take a field trip to the National Road Museum
• Research and experiment further with Niantic’s SDK, following their tutorials for setting up the tech
• Flesh out game design for quarters, doing research and attending the transformational design workshop
• Contact the Perennial Project and request access to 3D model of Searight’s Tollhouse