Augmented Reality and Heritage

Last month I entered a poster into the UCL Graduate School Poster Competition and was lucky enough to win first prize. I find conference posters a bit of a strange animal. The poster session always seems to take place over lunchtime or the coffee break and more often than not the person who made the poster isn’t around to talk you through it. You are then usually left with a poster that has masses of text, that either has too much detail or not enough, and the whole thing can get quickly boring.

I wanted to challenge this a little bit, and as my poster subject was my work with AR, I was provided with the perfect opportunity. The poster was a pretty simple (but hopefully striking) design, a pair of old school binoculars looking at some rocks on Leskernick Hill, Bodmin Moor. The area within the binoculars shows some roundhouses  – giving the impression that looking through the bins reveals the ancient landscape.

I tried to keep the text to a bare minimum so that the poster was dominated by the binoculars. However, this being an AR project, there was a bit of a twist. Using the Junaio API I augmented the poster with a video that overlaid the whole thing when viewed through a smartphone or tablet. The video showed the binoculars moving around the poster, revealing more of the roundhouses.

I am increasingly finding that the best way to explain AR is to give someone an example of it. It was a bit of a gamble, as in order to see the AR content the viewer needed to have a smartphone, have an app to scan the QR code on the poster and have good enough internet access to install and run the Junaio app. The main judge of the competition wasn’t at the prize-giving, so I didn’t get any feedback or a chance to ask if they had seen the AR content, but they awarded it first prize so I hope they did!

I am of course not the first person to use AR in a poster, but I am sure that it will become a lot more popular as it really is an excellent way of adding content to a poster, without being too intrusive. I guess at the moment it could be seen as being a little gimmicky, however this isn’t all that bad when trying to attract people to your poster and your research. One of the important things to remember though is that the poster needs to be able to stand on it’s own without the AR content, as it is quite an ask at the moment to get people to download an app on their phone just to learn more about your research.

The process of adding the content via the Junaio app also wasn’t quite as easy as I had hoped, mainly because the video itself had to be made into a 3D object and be of a very low quality and in a special .3g2 format to enable it to be delivered fast to a mobile device. You immediately lose your audience if they have to wait 2 minutes for your content to download and the .3g2 format was specifically designed to look ok on a smartphone screen and be small enough to download quickly. However, as you can see from the video above, the quality is pretty poor. I created the animation using 3D Studio Max, and then rendered it out to a number of tiffs. I then used ffmpeg to render the tiffs to a video and encoded it into the .3g2 format. The Junaio developer website has instructions for how to do all of this, but it is not really for the faint of heart.  Junaio provides a number of sample PHP scripts that can be run on your own server to deliver the content, and their trouble-shooting process is really excellent. So if you have your own webserver and are happy with tweaking some scripts then you can do some really quite nice stuff. I should note that they also have a simple upload interface for creating simple AR ‘channels’ which is a great way of quickly getting things up there – but doesn’t allow you to have total control or upload videos. But, if you want to pop a simple 3D model on your conference poster, then the Junaio Channel Creator is the app for you! The other thing to remember if you want to augment your own conference poster, is that the channels can take up to a week to be approved by Junaio, so you can’t leave it all to the last minute!

I suspect we will be seeing many more AR-enabled conference posters, particularly as AR booklets, magazines and museum guides are becoming more popular. One can envisage holographic type projections of people standing beside their posters talking the viewers through it, or interactive posters where the content changes depending on what and where you touch it. As I keep coming back to on this blog, it is the melding of the paper with the digital that I find so fascinating about AR, the ability to re-purpose old ideas (such as the conference poster) and breathe new life into the concept – but without losing the original purpose and feel of the thing itself. The design of the paper poster stands on its own (for better or worse!) and the AR content just gives the creator the chance to provide further information and give the viewer that extra dimension into their research.