How NYAM engaged Augmented Reality to empower a place-based narrative against Chicago gun violence
VAMONDE Case Study
By Anijo Mathew
Founder and Chief Experience Officer/Vamonde + Academic Director of the Ed Kaplan Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship/IllinoisTech Chicago
On March 24, 2018, we witnessed an amazing event. Fighting on behalf of their classmates and all other young kids who have lost lives in gun-related crimes, the students of Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida led as many as 800,000 people in a march in Washington DC. Now known as the March for our Lives, it is reported that the event drew close to 1.2 million people all around the world demonstrating for tighter gun control laws. With support from celebrities, politicians, and media, these teenagers showed us once again that they hold the power to change things, especially around subjects that affect them at a personal level such as gun violence.
About a year ago, Janice Samuels, a higher-ed administrator, and educational technology leader, had a similar idea to fight against the narrative of violence that had permeated Chicago’s streets. She founded the National Youth Art Movement (NYAM): a non-profit focused on engaging the power of creative teenagers to fight against gun violence. Janice believed that teenagers could present a lasting impact on the topic of gun violence in Chicago. They just needed someone to empower them with the right type of outlets.
NYAM worked with teenagers in Chicago affected by violence, helped them express their experiences through art in the form of murals, paintings, and graphic art, and displayed the artwork on billboards in Chicago’s South and West neighborhoods for six weeks. They then invited the public to walk through these neighborhoods and engage with the art, learn about the teenagers, and how they were affected by the violence while embedded in the neighborhoods.
Janice came to VAMONDE because she needed a way to create an experience that told the stories of the billboards and brought them to life. Our team worked very closely with Janice and NYAM to build an adventure connecting the sixteen billboards. The adventure brought people to the billboards and allowed them to access the story behind them on their phone while embedded in the context of that Chicago neighborhood. They read about the art and watched interviews with the artists, who explained how they used art to interpret the violence they were seeing around them.
The second part of her request, bringing the art to life, was slightly more complicated. Technologies such as augmented reality (AR) are already proving that it is possible to make static imagery more interactive; the problem, however, is that in most cases it requires the user to download a separate app or software on their phone. We wanted a way to animate the billboards within a VAMONDE story. So we created a new AR engine in VAMONDE which enables artists to overlay digital content on top of their physical art such that when a user looks at a mural or a billboard, the art will grow and change, or transform based on the time of day, or react to the person looking at it.
By the time Janice came to us, the engineering team had already successfully embedded AR into VAMONDE such that:
- The phone could recognize the artwork in the physical environment and make it come alive as part of a story.
- Do this without opening a whole new app to see the augmented reality content.
NYAM worked with a digital artist who designed an animation to go with each art piece. The team at VAMONDE overlaid the animation on top of the physical art to extend it digitally. An AR window within each post prompted the user to pick the phone up when they were near a particular billboard. VAMONDE recognized the artwork and layered the digital video seamlessly on top of it such that the art itself transformed as you looked through the phone. The animations were contextual to each piece and added a layer of depth to each static artwork.
From August 28th to October 1st, 2017, NYAM organized several interactive art tours of the billboards where participants were prompted to not just read the story but also make the art come alive through the AR window in the story. Although the display period has passed, the effect of using AR to engage the public with social causes is just beginning to hit its stride. Several organizations came back to support Janice’s future explorations in this area.
Janice and her team of teenage artists were also invited to the Nobel Peace Prize Forum in Minneapolis. VAMONDE was used at the Forum again to augment the physical experience on users phones. In April, Janice will present the NYAM+VAMONDE project at the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), the most prestigious conference in the field of human-computer interaction and one of the top-ranked conferences in computer science. These two very different events recognize how valuable this VAMONDE AR powered experience is…from both a socio-cultural and a technological perspective.
While NYAM used AR to address a social issue, AR has the power to touch every aspect of a cultural travel experience. In fact, we have had several partners reach out to us to look at AR as a strategy for engaging their audience. As a content manager in a tourism organization, you can use AR in many different ways:
- In-place learning — photographs of historic events or videos interviews of people laid over physical buildings, streets, art, or sculptures.
- Preservation — a timeline approach to preservation where users can literally see a place transform in front of their eyes.
- Artistic expressions embedded in place — physical street art which transforms as you look through the phone using digital animations.
- Make visible that which is invisible — hidden physical assets can be made visible using digital overlays, sounds that play as you walk through a corridor or alley.
- Educate through narrowcasting — augment existing resources by calling out specific aspects of the place or experience that appeal to a specific audience
As you can see, the possibilities are endless. Once partners trigger the augmented reality option on VAMONDE, there are several ways that they can use it to create powerful digital extensions to their already exciting physical experiences. The NYAM project presented us with a project where the story was the hero — the narrative powered teenagers to express their perspectives on the topic of gun violence, using several layers of physical and digital art. It illustrated how art and cultural organizations can engage physical places in their storytelling and then extend that experience using augmented reality.
From our end, the NYAM adventure is a great way to show how impactful the VAMONDE AR is from a technological standpoint. Very few digital platforms, let alone tourism platforms, can do with AR what we do at VAMONDE. Augmented Reality will continue to transform travel in the next decade and VAMONDE intends to remain at the forefront of that innovation.
