client overview

“BRANCHOUT: COMMUNITY-BASED INTERACTIVE PERFORMANCE” is an upcoming interdisciplinary, collaborative performance led by Principal Investigator Alison Dobbins (MSU, Dept. of Theatre). According to Dobbins, “The goal of this project is to shift individual engagement with the environment from a singular to a community perspective. An immersive performance will be generated that prompts the audience to explore their assumptions of individuality, communication, and sustainability.” BranchOut received funding from The Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs (MCACA) in 2021.

project overview

One of the components of the interactive performances will be augmented reality (AR) experiences throughout the performance space. Due to my previous work in interdisciplinary art/science projects and with AR with Science Gallery Detroit, I was asked to be part the team and create AR experiences for the BranchOut live performances.

My role: AR experience researcher and designer, client communication

Team: Grant PI, additional members of grant team, three AR researchers/designers

The process

TDI workshops feature a short presentation on the method, a survey-like instrument of prompts that users rank on a Likert scale, a lightly facilitated dialogue about the instrument, another round of the instrument, and a co-creation activity that builds on the topics from the dialogue. Along with my co-facilitators, we decided on a three-hour duration for this workshop in order to give participants time to dig deep into prompts and the co-In December 2021, our team met with the PI to explore the performance spaces (both outdoor and indoor), understand the flow of the performance and experience, understand the PI’s desired AR experiences, and ideate on potential AR opportunities. Working on finding a platform with several months before the actual show allows us in the intervening months between now and the performance try experimental approaches on additional platforms.

On this project, my role is to communicate with the client to meet and exchange information, evaluate AR platforms, collaboratively decide on the platform(s) for the experiences, and create/co-create XR experiences. Between the end of December 2021 and January 2022, I conducted experiments with a variety of existing AR platforms, finding that Snapchat could be viable backup solution for our project. I also evaluated using realitycomposer’s object detection options.

In January 2022, our AR team met, evaluated our expertise and available time, considered the potential performance attendees (their needs, mobility, technological familiarity, device availability), and discussed the performance locations’ impact on our choice of AR experiences. We decided that we needed solution that a) did not require the user to install an additional app, b) did not need a high level of coding experience, and c) could be moved inside in case of inclement weather. I tested five different no-code options and compared them across a variety of dimensions, including platform interoperability of their services (Android vs. iOS), tether to a dedicated app, and east of development. After comparing my results with results from our team, we converged on a platform solution and the option of triggering the AR experiences with QR codes, rather than through a dedicated app.

After this, we met with the project PI in late January 2022 to decide on a specific number of QR-based experiences and the content of those experiences. To maintain the surprise for potential participants, we have chosen to not disclose the details of these experiences. We co-created a plan for executing the AR component: the PI team will send us sample assets in early February, the AR team will create QR-code base experiences in February and March, beta-test and make last minute adjustments in March and April. Finally, as one of the experiences will be based on participant feedback from previous performances (with the first performance being seeded by the team), we are also developing a strategy to build and swap assets in/out before each performance along with our beta testing.

Deliverables

Planning to deliver a series of four to six QR code-triggered outdoor and indoor AR experiences for the live performances of BranchOut in April 2022.

Lessons learned

Team Composition for XR Teams
Teams with a serious desire to create bespoke interactions must consider their team composition and expertise (e.g. expertise in creating 2D/3D assets, expertise in creating animation, coding expertise) because the expertise of the team will drive the level of offerings that you and/or your team can provide to a client.

Factors Influencing AR
Many factors can influence your AR offerings. One examples of these factors is weather. Several of my beta occurred outside in the cold Michigan winter; this limited device performance while creating and testing AR experiences. Additionally, with seasonally variable triggers such as plants, weather conditions can change the trigger itself, which adds complexity to multi-month AR experience development.