AR-t
HCI Design
Tools: Adobe Photoshop + Google forms + Microsoft Word + Excel
January 2019 - May 2019
Advanced Human-Computer Interaction Design Course / Team Project
Overview
PROBLEM
It’s hard to engage and understand visual art in physical spaces!
Visual art in museums often requires an elite artistic education to properly understand the work and can be inaccessible to people without the surplus time or money to visit these spaces. Furthermore, many may find it difficult to immerse themselves in art pieces in the museum due to how formal and limited the experience is; there is limited interactivity causing the experience to become mundane.
SOLUTION
Bring the museum home with you with AR-t.
AR-t imagines an augmented reality system that enables users to “bring the museum experience home.” This system allows you to engage with a wide breadth of art, learn about, and interact with virtual art pieces in realtime. Through an AR glasses system, users can curate a virtual gallery within any space there are in. This solution removes barriers and the burdens of the current art education experience. People can immerse themselves in “curated galleries” without having to be physically in a museum space.
Methods
Contextual Interviews, Prototyping, Bodystorming, User Enactment, Surveys, Design Ethnography.
Team
Nicholas Markus, Sarah Brown, Samuel Williams & Lolia Briggs
Role
My role within this project was similar to all other team members. This including acting a facilitator for the interviews, user enactments, and design ethnography. I also functioned as a designer for the final prototype.
Design Process
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1.Generative Research
Background Research
The first step of our ideation process was to perform background research. With our focus on art experience in the museum space, we researched ways in which we could understand and design for this problem. As a result, we underwent a literature review in which we focus on the keywords of art education, museum experience, and technology in the museum.
Literature review Takeaways
Both new and old forms of technology shape the way people consume art and the cultural implications of art - Tillander, M. (January, 2011). Creativity, Technology, Art, and Pedagogical Practices
Many museums have already begun to change the way their art is consumed using technology. Many of these places explicitly steer away from the word “museum,” however, describing themselves as experiences rather than spaces.
Museum of Ice Cream - Instagram Popup Museum
Museums of Instagram are set around a popular theme, such as Candytopia, a candy wonderland with large sugar sculptures, bright saccharine colors, and amusement park-esque games. These elaborate rooms are engaging and fun, they are also “instagrammable.”
The Immersion Room in NYC’s Cooper-Hewitt museum
The Immersion Room in New York City’s Cooper-Hewitt museum, for example, allows visitors to interact with the art by creating a design and projecting it onto the walls. This further engages visitors by providing a platform where they can become immersed in their own art.
Conclusion
Through this background research, we decided on two main objectives:
To provide easily accessible art education
To use technology to engage and connect users.
We found that it is crucial to redesign viewing visual art as an experience to include an intuitive learning aspect as well as a fluid exchange of thoughts and ideas.
Generative Methods
During this stage of the design process my team and I attempted to gauge a better understanding of our problem space through various research methods. This included surveys, contextual interviews, an ethnographic study, and bodystorming. Furthermore, we started to flush out a solution.
INTERVIEWs
We conducted 5 contextual interviews. Many of our participants were female junior and seniors. This demographic breakdown was unintentional being that these were the only people that agreed to do the interviews. Interviews ran for 30 minutes. Interviewees were questioned on how
People learn about and experience art.
Challenges to learning about art.
These questions allowed us to delve deeper into how people experience, engage and interact with art.
DESIGN ETHNOGRAPHY
Our design ethnography took place in Cornell’s Johnson Museum. Each team member was tasked with visiting the Johnson Museum for 30 minutes - 1 hour.
We were each responsible :
Observing people’s interactions with the art,
Engaging with the people there, including the museum workers
Experiencing the overall atmosphere of the space.
BODY STORMING
Based on the observations we collected during the ethnographic study we performed a bodystorming session. As a group, we visited the Johnson Museum for about 45 minutes. We discussed ways we could augment or improve our experiences in the space. The focus of our bodystorming session was to immerse ourselves in the museum space and take away experiences that are valuable in the process of viewing art that can then be applied and used within our solutions.
Findings
Overall Findings: Using our findings from the surveys, interviews, and ethnographic study, we identified four major insights to incorporate into our design:
1. PHYSICAL SPACE
People value physical art spaces
People value the lack of distractions, the intentional curation, and immersive nature of museums. Many, however, do not have the opportunity to visit physical spaces and thus use online exploration. Participants explicitly expressed that they preferred physical spaces over online when talking about the experience itself; ultimately, they value the art available online as well.
3. SOCIAL V. PERSONAL
People experience art both on their own and with others
Most people want time to digest art on their own, but also want to share thoughts and opinions with their friends. When people have conversations about art, this is also a method of informal education.
2. EDUCATION
Art education is often an informal process
People rarely read textbooks or spend more than a few minutes studying an art. Instead, they converse with others, analyze the painting up close, do a brief online lookup, or even create their own art. Additionally, the museum experience can get repetitive and even boring for those not looking for formal art education.
4. INTERACTIVE
People gravitate towards interactive elements at the Museum.
People are most often attracted to “unconventional” pieces of art that are not just 2D paintings. People will also interact with technology, be it their own mobile devices or technologies in the museum itself.
2. Prototype & Evaluate
Introducing AR-t, the virtual art gallery
After compiling all our notes from our various research methods we organized a brainstorming session to come up with a solution for our problem. Our focus then became Augment Reality. We decided to bring the museum experience to the virtual world through AR. We came up with the concept of AR-t, a virtual art gallery system accessed through a tech-glasses device that will allow users to curate and share virtual galleries of their own.
Low-Fidelity Prototype
Mockups & Sketches
Virtual 3D Gallery
Users can manipulate the virtual space
Users can interact with friends in virtual space
Mid-fidelity Prototype
This prototype was a simulated gallery that was set up in a classroom. The “virtual”' space is the class room itself, and the virtual paintings were printed and hand drawn pictures that were posted along the walls of the classroom. To test this prototype a user enactment was performed with four participants.
USER ENACTMENTS
We recruited four participants to conduct a user enactment. Participants were to use the prototype to perform multiple tasks given out by the instructor (one of the team members)
Once the participants arrived, over a span of 45 minutes, they were given 3 scenarios to perform using the prototype. Participants were each given a card with sticky notes which represented the different functionalities of the AR device.
The scenarios for the user enactment included:
You are a group of elementary schoolers doing a report on “Perspective.” Explore the museum and gather information on perspective.
You are high school students. Explore the space and leave tags (comments) on a piece for your friends to read.
You are a group of college students who are curating your own custom digital gallery.
Participants explored each scenario using our list of task
These tasks allow us to explore the various facets of interactivity, engagement, and social experience that we found necessary in art education and art immersion.
Findings
Participants enjoyed the interactivity and sociability of using the prototype
While users thought that the interactive elements were cool, still wanted a basic informational feature about art style
People were very attracted experiencing art in full projection
Users enjoyed experiencing the glasses as a group (same view)
Overall, users expressed that they were excited for our solution and enjoyed executing the different tasks we laid out for them.
3. Final Design
Introducing…AR-T,
the is an augmented reality glasses that “Brings the Museum Experience Home.” Once a user puts on the AR-t glasses, they can experience and view digital artifacts & renditions of visual art wherever they are. They can interact with these artifacts through digital manipulation, image exploration, and gallery curation.
High-fidelity InVISION Prototype
FInal Design Functionalities
Search for art “explore”
Our solution aims to make it easy to find art without a deep knowledge. Users can search on a category, “perspective,” for example, and be shown a wide range of visual art pieces. The search will provide a breadth of art, presenting pieces from different platforms.
Save Images
From their searches, users can save a piece of art. This allows you to take the art with you wherever you go and access it anytime. They can then use this to curate their own gallery.
Scan Art to Learn More
People were heavily interested in the idea about learning about art and art process itself. Usually, placard just summarize what the piece is about, but our participants expressed that they also wanted to also learn about the how. In our solution, a user can hover over an art piece, tap on it and they can get augmented insights into the who, what, and the how of the art.
Manipulate Art
People applied principles that they learned about the art to the art when curating the gallery. For example, when asked to “deconstruct pop culture,” they used the knowledge they gained about Warhol and Mariyln to manipulate the art. In our findings, people liked to interact with art, and also learned about art by mimicking it.
360 Image View
An immersive art experience where you can see and learn about the art in granular detail. A user will choose to project a piece of art, and the art will project itself on all four augmented walls of the glasses. For example if you are viewing a painting of a room through the glasses the virtual room of the painting will be superimposed over the physical room in the real world.
Curate Your Own Gallery
Users have the ability to select and move different pieces around the room and curate a gallery to their pleasure. They can save these galleries and share them with friends. While curating a gallery is not a direct solution to art education, it adds a personal, social and fun element of art viewing. As assessed through our findings, people like going to museums, but museums are not accessible and require time to visit, so this provides an alternative option. When testing during our user enactments, this was very attractive to users.
Our solution is heavily refined and supported by our user enactments. Through our user enactments, we were able to remove features that users did not seem to find important/appealing and flesh out features that they were attracted to. For example, we initially likened our system to a social media system where users could tag friends and leave comments on art pieces. Through our user enactments, we realized that our system would actually facilitate users to physically come together and socialize, and so we did not have to compensate for socializing in another form.
Conclusion
Overall, our research proposes reimagining the museum going experience; users can gain control over the experience, curating and viewing art they want to see and in the format they choose or create.
As technologies evolve, traditional physical art spaces will as well. By wearing our glasses, users will have the opportunity to interact with and socialize with art in new and unimagined ways, all the while educating themselves on visual arts.