Using augmented reality and music, our installation aimed to provide people with new ways to build and experience their own unique city. We presented four different AR experiences allowing people to create, learn and experience different urban planning concepts. Still available on the Google Play store, 'Future Cities for Future People' is an AR experience that hopes to improve community engagement in urban planning.

Our application presents four unique AR experiences that allow participants to learn about urban planning concepts, visualise future urban planning ideas, and build their own AR city. This city can then be viewed in first person and experienced at street level. Lastly, we presented a portal to another urban environment, to demonstrate the possibilities of AR to visualise entire urban environments at scale. This application hopes to further our understanding of ways that we can use AR to engage with communities and gather their input regarding future urban developments. During our study at the Curiocity festival, we gathered data regarding our participants choices within the application when building their own city, and believe this demonstrates a novel way to gather feedback from citizens aside from surveys or interviews. As a first step towards AR community engagement, this prototype in a public setting provided a number of interesting insights into the challenges and limitations and also the opportunities and preferred methods of AR as a tool for community engagement.

https://curiocitybrisbane.com/events/future-cities-for-future-people/

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.augmentedsociality.curiocityfuturecities

Details

Team members : Michael Hunter, Alessandro Soro, Ross Brown, Joel Harman

Project leader(s) : Michael Hunter

Sponsors : Curiocity Festival

Descriptions

Technical Concept : Using Unity and the ARCore kit, we developed an augmented reality application for android devices that allows users to play through four different AR experiences. We had to keep the poly count low to improve performance across devices and the overall filesize. This application can be downloaded at the links attached.

Visual Concept : Visually, this application used low polygon models for the augmented reality experience. To appeal to all ages and to move closer towards a sense of play, and also due to the technical limitations of performance across multiple devices.

Credits

Michael Hunter

Michael Hunter

Michael Hunter

Michael Hunter

Michael Hunter

Michael Hunter