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
- an augmented reality application for phones (preferably using Niantic’s SDK), which
- 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