Learning & Leading Through Technology

18 Learning & Leading with Technology | March/April 2014 and feel of a gallery that showed true respect for its artists. To that end, our team printed the student art with high-quality printers and unobtrusively Velcroed it to the wall. We tried to make the nameplates look as professional as possible on a small budget. The gallery was BYOD, but we provided earbuds to gallery visitors so they could hear overlays with audio.

Student volunteers from the Alaska Association of Student Governments served as the gallery docents. Throughout the four days of the show, they helped visitors download and learn how to use the AR app Aurasma, handed out free earbuds to visitors, and showed them how to make the most of their ARt gallery experience. The result was a high-end, interactive, and interesting experience for all.

Creating the ARt Gallery

Creating the AR “backend” is tedious but fairly straightforward.

Aurasma set me up as a “partner,”
which allowed me to upload student
triggers and overlays to my Aurasma
account and program the relation-
ships between them: “When a mo-
bile device sees this trigger, then
play this overlay.”
From the gallery visitor’s perspec-
tive, the process of accessing the ARt
gallery was quite simple. After docents
helped them download Aurasma to
their devices, visitors followed Ja-
sonOhler’s Channel (a very simple
software look-up procedure) where
we stored all of the ARt gallery media
and relationships. Accessing the ARt
was as easy as pointing their mobile
devices at a gallery display and wait-
ing to see what happened.

Some AR purists feel that AR isn’t AR unless the trigger and overlay appear on the screen simultaneously. To that I say, “Hogwarts!” The purpose of an art form is to stretch it, bend it, and in this case, think outside the screen.

In some cases, ARtwork in the gallery was displayed entirely digitally. But it often didn’t make sense to force both the AR triggers and overlays to appear on a small screen, given that the triggers were right in front of them on the wall. A squeeze like that would have been hard enough for an iPad and even worse for an iPhone. It made more sense to try combining the RL and VR space to see what we could come up with.

With this in mind, we purposely tried to use AR in as many ways as possible. Here are some examples:

Nameplates trigger artwork. In some cases, teachers wanted to contribute student artwork but didn’t have supplementary artwork to augment it. For these pieces, the triggers were nameplates, which acted like QR codes with extra information that launched virtual art on visitors’ screens.

ARtwork triggers video overlays. Artists used video overlays in a number

Mobile devices scan and read triggers embedded in student artwork, then display a second part of the artwork that is visible only in the digital world. In this piece, a photo of a daydreaming student triggers a video of what he is imagining.