Urban XR has been working with Ipswich Central Business Improvement District in the UK on a proof of concept phone Augmented Reality experience. The work uses the latest geolocation AR technology to bring to life the frontage of Ipswich Town Hall which overlooks Cornhill Square in the city centre.
Working alongside Ipswich Central, we developed a brief that explored using Ipswich Town Hall’s main facade as an augmented reality canvas that could celebrate its architecture, be joyful, creative, provide historical insight and also provide positive messaging to visitors to the town centre.
By developing an abstract colourful and animated overlay to the building elevation, users experience a shot of colour and movement that is inspired by the detail and order of the elevation of the existing building. This draws attention to the architectural detail and gets users to “lookup” and engage with the building. During the AR experience, users can select two buttons, “Faces” and “Figures”. The shapes next to the buttons refer to those associated with the carvings and statues on the Town Hall which are included in the overlay.
Selecting these buttons takes users to web pages that provide historical information as to why these carvings appear on the building. These information pages are part of a central website that explains the context of the AR experience at the Town Hall and the messaging that appears above the building in the experience. This website could then act as a central location for an expanded town-wide AR trail in the future, working with different artists and buildings.
The “thank you keyworkers” banner floating above the building is thanks to their vital work done over the pandemic. The colour palette of the artwork is also inspired by the rainbow used in support of the keyworkers during the pandemic in the UK.
The AR overlay is triggered by the phone camera recognising the building detail (as point cloud scan of the building is held on cloud servers to enable this). The user interaction is simple from the application, they simply hold the phone camera up to the building frontage and this activates the experience which anchors the artwork accurately to the building frontage. Users can walk around and experience the artwork from different viewpoints and angles due to its excellent stability and accuracy. The artwork can be any 3D content and we are looking forward to progressing more use cases using our outdoor Augmented Reality technology with our clients!
Users can walk around and experience the artwork from different viewpoints and angles due to its excellent stability and accuracy. The artwork can be any 3D content and we are looking forward to progressing more use cases using our outdoor Augmented Reality technology with our clients!
Thank you to our client, Ipswich Central and also our project collaborators Eggbox Studios, InterRealityLabs and Unity Developers.
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