Encounter: A Door to the Wild
AR Museum Experience
Interactive AR
Museum Experience
Interaction Driven Environments
A multi-sensory and immersive museum experience that promotes experiential learning, information browsing to make museums more engaging.
Role
Exploratory Research, Interviews, Conceptual Design, Illustration, UI & Wireframes, AR Prototyping
Tools
Illustrator, Adobe XD, Cinema 4D, Spark AR, Reality Composer, After Effects, Premier Pro
Team & Duration
Anuprita Ranade, Deepika Dixit, Jisoo Shon, Michelle Chou
6 Weeks, 2019
Encounter is an immersive experience which acts as a portal to a world through engaging storytelling
The concept
Immerse in a Visual Landscape
Immerse yourself in the habitats of the North American Wildlife. Hear the sounds and understand what scene is being depicted in the diorama
Explore and Learn about the animals
Explore and know things about various North American Wildlife Animals. What makes them unique and know these facts in relation to you for a better understanding.
Interact with your Imaginary Animal
Create your own animal using the traits you have learnt by exploring and have a memorable fun experience when you see your animal on the display wall.
User Journey
Information Browsing
This aspect of the experience focuses on highlighting several important features of the animal. It helps the viewers not only look at the habitat but also understand what each function each feature of the animal serves to the animal instead of just reading off the plaque.
What we observed was that the plaque were very dimly lit and had very low contrast and was very text heavy. It was uninviting and in this day and age, all of us react to visual much better than just plain text.
Experiential Learning
What we realized was human learns best when things are in relation with them. Instead of just saying that a Polar bear weighs 990 pounds, one remembers it better in comparison to their own weight.
Social Interaction
The card stock takeaway card is a souvenir and a representation of the imaginary animal collected by you.
It is a meant to be collected as memorabilia and help people engage in conversations about the animal they chose.
Re-engagement
Reengaging the audience by allowing them to experience that imaginary animal in AR and adding a sense of collection which helps increase the visits to museum.
The AR experience also let’s them see the information related to the super powers collected by them. This help people revisit the features collected by them and also know more facts.
How might we promote an immersive,
multi-sensory and engaging museum experience?
A shift in the museum’s brand personality is needed to achieve it vision.
The museum’s were a source of knowledge and information, with changing times it has to be much more than information provider to be relevant ten years down the line
Exploratory Research
Onsite Research
From Stakeholder’s Perspective
We had the opportunity to connect with Rebecca Shreckengast, Director of Exhibition Experience and CMU alumna. She shared invaluable insights in terms of what the audience like, what is the key role of the museum from her perspective as an experienced museum curator and exhibition designer.
Key Insights
Future of museums are personalization & customized experiences
People come with the purpose of a social experience
Museum should be a place to inspire people rather than preach to them
Fly on the Wall Observation
User Groups: Most visitors were parents with their children. The group size was mostly 3–4.
Behavior: The most common activities was parents trying to explain the exhibit information to their kids
Kids were mostly interested in touching everything and playing with the exhibits (and digital screens).
Environment: The museum encourages visitors to touch and feel various parts of exhibits. However, most displays are not easily accessible for kids.
Interviews
Primary user research
We tried to understand why did they decide to visit the museum?
What were some of their favorite exhibits?
What other places do they visit?
What would they like to take back out of museum experience?
Research Synthesis
The experience is very unidirectional and lacks multi-sensory stimulation and engaging storytelling.
Natural “History” Museum lacks temporality & artifacts are something just to look at
It was easier to grasp content that could be related to them or their personal experiences.
People see museum as a family friendly indoor place. Museum visits always come after Zoo visits.
Analyzing other Interactive Spaces
Key Insights from
Children's Museum of Pittsburgh
Promotes
social and emotional learning
Participative and co-creative
Encourages inquiry and use of imagination
Users were immersed for hours and weren’t just strolling by
Finding the Right Balance
We picked qualities from both museums. We wanted to leverage the participative, multi-sensory, encourages inquiry & imagination quality of the children’s museum. merge them with the educative qualities of CMNH and that would be our concept.
Choosing an area for Intervention
Dioramas’ Problem Space
Earlier, dioramas were a medium for people to explore different cultures, natural habitats around the world around them before the advent of modern media and exposure technology.
Static & Quiet. Visitors just stroll by.
Reaffirms the aspect of “Dead Zoo”.
A one-way, detached visual experience.
A huge shift in energy and experience in contrast to the dinosaur exhibits.
Understanding Museum Visitors’ Motivations and Learning by Dr. John H. Falk
Three User Groups
Explorers
They are curiosity driven and have a generic interest in the content of the museum.
Experience seekers
They are motivated to visit because they look at the museum as an important destination
Rechargers
They go to museums for a restorative experience. They love visiting the museum over and over again because they love being there
Understanding the spectrum
of Audience Engagement
By Audience Atlas Pittsburgh for CMNH
From A Window to the Wild to A Door to the Wild
The dioramas are described by the museums as a window to the wild as we can see them from a distance inside their glass chambers.
Since we are augmenting the environment and making the user feel like they are entering the animal’s habitat, our concept is a “door to the wild”. This experience will act as a “portal to an amazing world”.
Illustration by Maryanne N.
Learning from other Media Sources
We then tried to understand how humans understand animals. We looked at documentaries, books, games and various blogs on the internet. We realized that we understand characteristics about animals by comparing them with our characteristics. For example, talking about the height of a giraffe won’t be exciting but when you say that a giraffe is X times taller than a human is more engaging for people.
Creating a User Journey
Building Phase
Understanding the Diorama Space
To plan which exhibits to choose, we had gone and did a video scouting of the place in order to capture the flow of visitors and also understand the amount of time spent and which areas would create bottleneck and how to achieve a good visitor flow
Studying the Visual features of the Animal
Once we finalized our exhibits, we looked at various attributes of each animal that would have some interesting facts around it and studied the form of each and every attribute to be able to create our own versions of animals
Studying the Habitat Environment in detail
To be able to create an immersive mixed reality, we had made sure to look at all the details. From the animals to the leave, stones, dry grass, sand texture of the environment to be able to create an experience of being in the wild
Setting the Mood with Sound
Creating an Identity
Creating the Imaginary Creatures
Make it stand out.
While I started looking at how mythical creatures are represented since they have a certain aura of superpower and mystic, I came across Alebrijes.
Alebrijes are brightly colored Mexican folk art sculptures of fantastical (fantasy/mythical) creatures. The bright colours and interesting patterns were a good fit for our project.
Keywords: Approachable, Friendly, Desirable
Iterate.Iterate.Iterate
Creating the Projection Mapping Wall
Making a memorable card
Making the AR Prototype
Testing using Spark by Facebook
Testing with Reality composer
Reflection
This was my first experience round designing for Augmented Reality.
While the field is still relatively in its nascent stage, it was a great experience to be able to work on a different technology and be able to think beyond 2D. Designing in the third dimension is difficult.
While we could have taken a serious and stoic approach, I believe our research did end up informing a lot of our decisions. This helped us carve an experience that was engaging yet informative.