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Day 1

Desk research and personal inspiration
Share references among us and talked about possible tools. We almost made the mistake of focusing on which tool to use, before having a clear idea, then moved back.
Walk out: reflection on how AR would fit. We almost body stormed to imagine how we would use different AR interfaces (e.g.: AR advertisements) in the environment close to us.
Compile mood boards: we compiled 2, the first one focused on what is the model of augmented content that Google and artists are promoting and imagining, and another one with references to tools that allow modifying public places on a small scale. At this stage we were considering the idea of building a framework to experience what a public space fully packed with AR content would look like, and how we could interact with such space, but the first feedback actually pushed us in another direction: first try to figure out why someone would use AR in a public place.

Links of the day:

HotNinja Wifi Messages

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We started the day with a short debrief about yesterday and which direction should we pick. We all agreed to explore COMMUNITY AR direction more and had 15 minutes timeboxed brainstorm to come up with as many ideas around the direction as possible.
Went out for a team walk and discussed the outcome of the brainstorm there. During the sharing session tried to stretch ideas more by asking questions "and then..".
We also agreed on possible assumptions which couldn't be researched at the moment like in the possible future scenario we will have: a) the unified protocol to provide/access the AR content from every device. b) physical surfaces will be proprietary AR real estate. c) AR content will be experienced constantly.

We came up with three concepts that should be presented during the feedback session, we tried to raise different design questions with every concept. We also thought about that the current state of AR is that we have content providers and content consumers and somehow we would like to merge those two into one and give more agency for users in this field.

All concepts are under the umbrella of question How might we enable people to start generating content in a physical/virtual space?

INTRUSIVE AR In a future filled with AR content in public places, how would AR vandalism and AR spam look like? The concept explores emerging activities like how to interfere in the constant stream of virtual objects curated and provided by future infrastructure owners and companies. We also took a step further in a fiction and raised the question of what kind of possible future jobs like AR environment cleaners could appear.
INFORMATION LAYERS One of the ways how to enable people to start contributing is on top of the public virtual view add private channels where people could share objects with one each other and overlay with them the layer of public information. The example we provided was a courtyard of the Institute where you can see the publicly available content there and also contribute and add content to different private channels.
AWARENESS OF VIRTUAL OBJECTS IN PHYSICAL SPACE Nowadays the augmented reality is relying on another layer that people can experience it mostly through sight and to do that they need a screen in between. So what if we enhance the interaction between the physical world and the virtual one, making the objects from the two worlds aware of the presence of each other. And then what if people can experience the virtual world through other senses like haptic?

Links of the day:

The main task in the morning was to come up with one set up what we are going to build and test on Friday. We had a clear direction that we will work with shared experiences and explore that field and have few possibilities for setups:

A dedicated virtual space for people for sharing the content. The main inspiration comes from a sculpture in Rome and probably this set up will be used during the final demo of the workshop.
Simple drawing in the space and sharing the experience with others
Leaving a drawing in a particular space and find it by someone else (requires using AR KIT 2 and persistent tracking)
AR meet up where every person wears an augmented costume (just for fun but turns out Facebook is about to do it)

While having a broader concept about sharing experience generated few possible scenarios for a first prototype. CONCEPTS

Did desk research divided into two directions: TECH > AR KIT, UNITY PLUGIN for trying functionality AR KIT2. What kind of current projects are in the market and what is offered by companies like FACEBOOK SNAPCHAT APPLE GOOGLE. What kind of objects could be placed in a space and share with people? We identified AR Drawings / AR Objects / 3D Merged with 2D (Snapchat Lens Studio is using GIPHY API to place 2D GIFs into 3D scenes), Dialog boxes that could be accessed from other media.
TEAM WALK & Popcorns agreed on the final output for FRIDAY and
feasibility check MVP CHUNKS - shared scene / persistent scene / how drawing function works in a unity SCENE.
After realising that AR KIT 2 could be a trouble as a set up we evaluated a possibility to use AR KIT 1.5 and create this setup 1ipad > Spacebrew > 2ipad

Our further plan: