Augmented and Virtual Reality on Historical Auburn Avenue
Through the Augmented Enrionments Lab at Georgia Tech, I produced a number of augmented, mixed, and virtual reality experiences for Auburn Avenue. The avenue has a long history connected with the Civil Rights and the struggle for freedom. Martin Luther King Jr. grew up on the street, and historically it was the epicenter of African-American commerce and wealth in the south. While Auburn Avenue is still a site of cultural heritage, many of the stories have not been archived or even uncovered. Through the lab we sought to use the affordances of emerging media to explore how they might bring some of these same stories to new audiences.
General Information
Project Role
Developer and Designer
Downloads Views
Closed Study
Tech Stack
Argon SDK, JavaScript, JQuery, Three.js, Node.js
Affiliated ResearchLab
Augmented Environments Lab, Georgia Institute of Technology
Publications, Presentations, and Workshops
2
Still Available
Yes
Various Projects
Collaborated with colleagues in The Augmented Environments Lab to develop a series generative engines for creating AR experiences for Georgia Tech’s Argon AR Browser. These templates make it easy for any student, designer, or artist to create engaging AR content for their projects. The engines create templates with all of the necessary code and only need to be uploaded to a server.
AR Audio Tour Experiences allow users to create AR audio tours, complete with 3D-location markers, in real world locations. The engine generates a complete set of code that developers can upload to a server. As a user walks through the world, the audio automatically begins to play. The template can be used for a variety of purposes ranging from audio tours to locative storytelling.
Collaborated with Haochen Zhang to develop an augmented reality walking tour for Auburn Avenue with audio from Andrew Young. The application allows Argon users to walk along the historic corridor and passively engage with audio content.
As users get within 10 meters of a historic site, the recorded audio begins to play. Additionally, floating MR cubes mark each specific landmark to guide the user along the tour. The app was evaluated by Dean Baker of City Saga and has led to future mixed reality projects in and around Atlanta.
Multipano AR experiences give users the ability to create a story using panoramic images and audio files. The engine allows users to create a five-act piece, but the template enables them to add as many as they would like. This new storytelling medium is quite flexible and can be modified for a multitude of different situations ranging from children’s stories to architectural tours.
This VR Multipano experience for Argon allows a user to visit key sites on historic Auburn Avenue. Each place is presented as an immersive equirectangular panorama and is narrated by Andrew Young. The work springs from previous projects developed with my colleagues Colin Freeman and Haochen Zhang. It was shown at the GVU 2016 Showcase/ Digital Media Demo Day in the Augmented Environments Lab and is an example of the multipanormana narrative template discussed in this section of the portfolio.