UWB IMD Student
Context
Through the use of augmented reality, POCket Tour provides a meaningful experience that visualizes the culture and history of people of color who are existing in Seattle's International District. For this project, I worked in creating a mobile application as an educational experience for people who would want to learn more about East Asian cultures.
Insipiration
During one of my courses, we studied a website called The Chicago 00 Project. The website is an award winning partnership between the Chicago History Museum and filmmaker Geoffrey Alan Rhodes in producing site-specific interactive and immersive multimedia experiences designed to showcase the Museum's film, photo, and sound archive and share Chicago's stories in new and unique ways. I thought that this was an amazing way for museums in using augmented and virtual reality to bringing digital installations to the real world.
Research
For my research, I wanted to narrow down a few specific locations to highlight through my prototype. Some of the iconic places include Uwajimaya, Panama Hotel, Tai Tung, and the Historic Chinatown Gate. Each spot holds an important part of the East Asian culture here in the International District and has a historical significance to the people of Seattle. I was able to interview Harry Chan, the third generation owner of the Tai Tung restaurant, and was able to learn how many famous people were regulars such as Bruce Lee and Anthony Bourdain. This interview helped give me a perspective of what it was like to growing up in Chinatown and understand what this area meant to him and his family.
Early Mock Ups
Low Fidelity Wireframes
Early Site Map
Challenges
One of the challenges that came up for this project was the amount of snow days that prevented me and my group in meeting to work together. Since we only had about three weeks to complete this, we needed to make sure that everyone was on board in communicating to each other online. All of us were willing to individually work on our specific roles but not being able to collaborate in person made it very difficult.
Code
This is the code that allowed us to use Xcode's SceneKit that powered the AR experience of our mobile application. It enabled us to use the apple developer's plane detection method in scanning a vertical surface to anchoring our location tags. I would've liked to implement a working GPS system by using apple's map navigation and geolocation system so our images could be anchored and shown in specific areas to be generated.
Prototype Demo
AR Experience
Future and Beyond
If we had time creating and further developing this prototype, I would've liked to interview more people for their experiences and done more research to be put in our augmented reality spaces. I see this as an exciting opportunity for educational growth and seeing that this project has a lot of potential . I would like to not only restrict this application to be used in Chinatown, but all over the different and diverse districts of Seattle.