Augmented reality præsentation_ystad_220910

Augmented reality: how can you use it?

Jacob Knudsen, Vejle MuseumKjetil Sandvik, University of Copenhagen

Museums, digital media and a perpetual beta way of communicating

• Case: “The 23 sculls – a conspiracy tail”• communicating cultural heritage in the age of

mobile media, experience economy and new learning formats:

• the history of Vejle (DK) communicated through an augmented reality game using mobile phones, web 2.0 mash-ups, a playable conspiracy plot, and the city as game universe

Challenges of digital media

• Participatory (social) media/web 2.0:• radical possibilities for dialogic processes, for

collaboration and co-creation• Communication as dynamic processes• Fixed solutions changeable, adaptive and user-

centered solutions• Uses of web 2.0 apps mashups: combinations of

cheap, effective and constantly updated and improved media technology

• Perpetual way of communication

Optimizing web 2.0-strategy: mashup

Videos pulled directly from YouTube

Pictures pulled directly from Flickr

Maps run in Google Maps with integrated info

Possible to get RSS-perscribe to each ’story’

The possibility for integrating the sitewith travelblog-services and travel-planning services like e.g. TripIt

From stand-alone website to web 2.0 mashup network-site

Augmentation

• an informational, aesthetical and/or emotional enhancement of our sense and experience of place by use of various framing strategies (e.g. Wallander’s Ystad) and media technologies (e.g. audio guided tours).

Understanding places

• we understand places through media (e.g. Lonely Planet, Google Earth, travel literature and so on),

• we use media to construct places (using cameras, mobile phones, GPS, maneuvering through 3D-structures by means of an interface and some kind of avatar in a computer game, and so on),

• media shapes our experience of places (guided tours, theme parks, computer simulated worlds like the ones found in computer games, and so on).

• augmentation in this context implies that the actual place is blended with mediated representations and media-inflected perceptions of the place.

Augmented places

• Places which has gotten a certain surplus of meaning, a certain kind of narrative embedded into it.

• Augmentation of actual places implies that the characteristics of these places have been enhanced in that a certain mode, atmosphere or story has beed added to them as extra layers of meaning.

Augmentation of places

• Augmentation may take place as a process of storytelling in which the place constitutes a scene for the performance or staged re-enactment of ‘true’ stories, that is actual events which at some point have taken place at the specific location and which are recognized as objectively authentic.

The staging of the Jack the Ripper-story runs through and organizes urban space of today’s London and thus changing it into a specific place with a specific atmosphere and a specific plot: the scene of the crime.

Augmentation of places

• Storytelling• Augmentation of places may happen through

fictionalization in which the actual places are working as settings for fictions, which again influence our perception of these places.

When tourists embark on one of this tours, they are taken on a guided walk through parts of the actual towns working as ‘scenes of the crime’ (Milan, Paris…) in Brown’s novel, but following the trails laid out not by some historical person or chain of historical events (like in the case of the Jack the Ripper-tour ) but by fictional characters and their actions and thus the actual places have become augmented as a result of fictionalization.

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Augmentation of places

• Storytelling• Fictionalization• Augmentation of places may happen as

construction of a kind of mixed reality in which the place has a status both as an actual location in the physical world and as a storyspace.

Split reality vs Mixed reality

• Split reality: switching between mediated space (e.g. inside the mobile phone) and physical space

• Mixed reality: blending between mediated and physical space (e.g. looking at physical space through a ‘agumented reality browser’ on the mobile phone)

• Mixed reality implies a certain way of telling stories connecting the actual and the fictional space (this is where Hikuin’s Vendetta goes wrong)

The 23 sculls

• The players are put in the role as journalists investigating the disappearance of a museum inspector.

• He has left behind a lot of notes and disturbing video clips on YouTube about a conspiracy engineered by powerful men throughout the history of Vejle city.

• And he has left maps, trails and layers of information about various places, various building, various persons – everything accessible on a variety of web 2.0-services as the player navigates through the physical town.

There are real human sculls in there!

The 23 sculls

• For the players the city has been altered, it has been augmented by the interplay between and interweaving of the mediated city and the actual physical city.

• As such this new, mixed reality version of Vejle, which the players now are to investigate, may be understood as an augmented place as explained.

The 23 sculls• The game has a traditional level structure with each

level being themed in a way so that there is a narrative progression:

• Level 1’s theme is “the city is filled with clues”, while level 2’s theme is “it is all about power” and finally the theme of level 3 is simply “everything is connected”.

• There are a lot of clues, hints, story fragments to be found both in the physical city and in its mediated online counterpart – pictures, videos, trails or routes may be found on Flikr, YouTube and Google Maps may be displayed as augmenting information layers over the various physical locations when they are observed through the camera lens and the augmented reality browser Layar.

Physical space as media• The physical space – the city quarters with its

streets, alleys, buildings, ornamentations such as statues, gargoyles and so on or the theme park with its narrative architecture including buildings and landscapes known from e.g. the catalog of Disney fairytales – is to some degree is functioning as media communicating specific types of information, specific types of stories.

• Several parts of the city of Vejle used as location for the 23 sculls game have these qualities of being media in themselves, as carriers of the story of Vejle.

Physical space as media

• With the use of mobile phones equipped with navigation tools and augmented reality browsers this information residing in the very architecture and infrastructure of the city may be pulled forth and made visible, accessible and interactive from the perspective of communicating history and cultural heritage and facilitating learning processes.

Mashup Webpage

Mashup Layar

By integrated we mean…

Our functions in Layar…so fare…

Summing up• Augmentation makes us see things in new ways:

Buildings are not just buildings, streets are not just streets – the carry stories, they carry cultural meaning which the players through the gameplay and the interplay between the physical space of the city and the mobile media may acquire, discuss, investigate and relate to.

• By applying a perpetual beta way of communicating and the use of mashups of continuously enhanced, improved and upgraded media application instead of creating prototypical systems, we may easily challenge and develop our way of communicating knowledge, communicating cultural heritage through augmented reality game systems based on participation, collaboration and co-creation.

Slides available on:

http://www.slideshare.net/sandvik