DPAM[AR]: an immersive ARt museum
Case Study
Role // Development & Project Management Lead | Client // DePaul Art Museum | Developed with // Polycam & Scavengar
DPAM[AR] is an augmented reality ARt museum displayed across DePaul University’s Lincoln Park quad. Using photogrammetry technology, our team was able to create 3D scans of pieces from the DePaul Art Museum’s permanent collection, which is otherwise off-view and unable to be explored by the public.
As users progress through DPAM[AR], they are shown five pieces of artwork curated into one of two experiences: an exhibit focusing on the work of Latinx artists in the collection, and one focusing on the contributions of LGBTQIA+ artists.
Hosted on Scavengar, an augmented reality experience hosting platform that uses Apple and Google maps data to create location-based experiences, DPAM[AR] is displayed across the quad for an accessible and engaging experience available in an always public, always free space. DPAM[AR] sought to engage art-minded people in the artworks that the DePaul Art Museum has to offer, concurrently promoting the museum and driving more foot traffic to the physical space. Since DPAM[AR] uses pieces that typically remain in storage, users are encouraged to visit the physical museum afterwards to see entirely new pieces.
This project was completed as part of DePaul University’s Undergraduate Capstone for the B.S. in User Experience Design program.
Project Team Members
Cate Wilhite served as our 3D modeling lead for the project. Taking the lead on our physical scanning, Cate was in charge of finding the best method for which to scan the pieces as well as working with museum staff to coordinate and facilitate our photogrammetry scanning sessions. Cate is pursuing a B.S. in User Experience Design with minors in Art and Business.
Cate Wilhite
Reece Laudano served as our research and design lead for the project. She took the lead on editing and perfecting our scans, as well as creating our logo, promotional flyers, and other branded content. Additionally, Reece did the majority of our curation research on what pieces from the collection we should include in our final experience. Reece is pursuing a B.S. in User Experience Design with a minor in Graphic Design.
Reece Laudano
Tori Smolen served as our development and project management lead for the project. She was responsible for communications with Scavengar and coordinating our use of their platform as well as creating and developing the end experience. Additionally, she was in charge of documenting our progress along the way with communications, presentations, and videos. Tori is pursuing a B.S. in User Experience Design and an M.S. in Entrepreneurship.
Tori Smolen
Project Partners & Stakeholders
DePaul Art Museum
The client and primary stakeholder for our project was the DePaul Art Museum (DPAM). The museum was interested in our capstone course’s help for ways to improve museum attendance and brand awareness through technology-focused projects. Our primary communications were with David Maruzzella, DPAM’s Collection & Exhibition manager, with additional help from Ionit Behar, the Associate Curator, and Laura-Caroline de Lara, DPAM’s director.
Scavengar
Additionally, our team was in consistent contact with Marc Wicht, the Co-Founder and Managing Director of Scavengar. Scavenger invested time in helping us realize DPAM[AR] as a project on their platform, as well as the use of their services under an educational license. We updated Scavengar on our use of their platform throughout our development experience, as our use of their platform for a museum-like experience was new and intriguing to the team.
Professor Lien Tran
Our advisor throughout the duration of the project was Professor Lien Tran. Prof. Tran provided continuous check-ins, feedback, and assistance with our project each week, connecting us with resources and professional designers to critique our work. Between helping us in our communications with partners, brainstorming roadblocks and limitations, and encouraging us to develop our project to its fullest potential, Prof. Tran was a key part of DPAM[AR]’s success.
The Problem
The DePaul Art Museum (DPAM), located next to the Fullerton stop in the Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago, hosts rotating exhibits focused on local, national, and international artists with an outstanding permanent collection of over 4,000 pieces. Despite their extensive collection and award-winning exhibits, the museum has difficulty advertising its offerings due to a few misconceptions about the museum and what it offers, and a minimal university budget for advertising. The name of the museum attaches it to the University in a way that implies they showcase student art when, in reality, the museum is full of local, national, and internationally-renowned art. DPAM worked with our class in hopes that we could provide an innovative and interesting technological solution to their branding and marketing concerns. Our individual teams were able to explore whichever technical avenue interested us most - and ours chose Augmented Reality.
Getting to Know Our Audience
After working with DPAM to understand their hopes for the outcome of our project, we ultimately settled on six primary user personas: a first-year DePaul student, a parent of a new student, a transfer student, an educator, a caregiver, and a young child. DPAM[AR] wanted to clarify to incoming students what the museum had to offer, which involves both incoming students, transfer students, and their families. Additionally, the museum hoped for more DePaul courses and programs to utilize the museum’s offerings, and bring more awareness to educators on campus. DPAM also wanted local residents to be aware of the museum - since the museum is primarily open during daytime hours and is relatively small in size, we decided to focus on caregivers and young children who may be looking for educational and enriching activities to engage with during the day.
Project Scope
This project spanned across 22 weeks, from January 3rd to June 9th. Our conceptualization for DPAM[AR] did not occur until around week 8, during which our teams had to solidify a plan for what our final product would be. Our constraints for the project were that it had to reach the testable prototype stage by the end of the project duration, had to be relatively low/no budget, utilize a form of technology that we could showcase our UX skills through, and provide some sort of positive improvement to the target category our team chose to work towards. DPAM[AR] was the project idea for the outreach team, whose goal was to get people to be more aware of the museum and to make their first visit to DPAM.
The majority of our scope and constraints were defined by our stakeholders at the start of the project, but became more restrictive about halfway through due to some university budget cuts and how that affected the museum. Fortunately, as we were able to create a project that did not require funding, DPAM[AR] did not have to realign our project scope based on that additional constraint.
Team members Cate & Tori creating user maps of our target audience in early stages of the project.
Design Process
Stage One: Research
We began our design process by conducting a stakeholder analysis to get more concrete data on our user base and their knowledge about the museum. This also better informed our personas and user analysis stage that followed.
View the findings report to see the survey questions & visualizations of the data pulled from the results.
Stage Two: Planning
We then began the planning stages of our development - what exactly did we hope to create? Where would the location be? How would we host it?
Through initial research on the available technology options and other localized AR experiences, we settled on Scavengar as our platform, an augmented reality art gallery as our ‘what’, and across DePaul’s campus as our ‘where’.
We later changed the experience to be centered just in DePaul’s quad due to some localization limitations with Scavengar - this change also made our experience more accessible, as it was all along flat ground with paved paths, and safer, as it did not require crossing any streets
View our initial maps first pitched to the museum above - click the arrows at the bottom right to expand and view the presentation larger.
Stage Three: Tech
From here, we began to learn how to use the technical elements that we would need to realize our project. This is where we first met with Marc, the co-Founder of Scavengar, to discuss licensing and how we could best use their platform. With the ability to have an app-less web link, quick and easy editing, and a free educational license, Scavengar was a great fit for our needs and constraints. At this time we also decided to use Polycam to conduct our scanning of the pieces into 3D models. Polycam, which offers both photogrammetry and LiDAR scanning capabilities, can be used on newer iphones for free. This allowed us to scan the art pieces in a way that was easy and did not require the purchasing of additional equipment.
Stage Four: Scanning & Development
Our next two stages, which happened concurrently, were to conduct our scanning and to begin developing our experience in Scavengar. We ended up conducting three separate scanning sessions to get the best quality scans of each of our chosen pieces. Additionally, we developed our experience in Scavengar’s software, incorporating instructions, copy and captions for each piece, and the path that users would take to get to and from each piece. While we scanned more pieces, we ended up using five in our first experience to prevent user difficulties with high file sizes on older phones.
User Testing Process
Our testing process started first with team testing, and then proceeded to peer testing. Fortunately our target audience involved many of our peers, which made finding a variety of test participants rather simple.
Our first testing was conducted by the team to test for any technical bugs and to make sure that the experience was presenting how we wanted. It was at this time that we discovered the localization issue - for longer experiences, Scavengar began to lose track of where the user was, causing misaligned localization and our pieces to show up in locations other than where we intended. Because of this early testing discovery, we then moved our experience to just the quad, which ended up working very smoothly.
Additionally, we discovered a bug in Scavengar’s hosting platform during secondary testing. The editor has an option to have your 3D asset rotate to gamify the experience, or have it stationary. While we were selecting stationary as our animation, it would re-set to rotation after saving the experience. We were able to work with Scavengar to troubleshoot this bug and enabled ‘billboard mode’, which adjusts so that the front of a 3D asset is always facing the user.
After this we conducted peer testing, which went well - users enjoyed the experience and seeing art in a new format right on their campus. One larger takeaway that we had revolved around a technical limitation - the 3D modeled art can appear realistic to an extent that it doesn’t stand out against the background much to users, causing some confusion about where the art was from a user perspective. While we were unable to remedy this ourselves, we suggested a new feature in the development editor to add a glow or backlight to scans to help them stand out better to users.
View our initial testing video to see the rotation bug discussed and how this affected the usability and purpose of DPAM[AR].
Outcomes & Results
At the end of our project timeline, we have a functioning experience that is up and can be used by the public. While we experienced some technical bugs with the software that may be fixed in later iterations of their development, our finished experience is otherwise polished and ready for use.
As our final product was completed shortly before the end of the project timeline, we are unable to measure the impact that it has on museum attendance, as well as how many users complete the experience. We hope to track these metrics later on with a follow-up survey at the end of our experience.
We sought out to create a technology-based experience that showcased the permanent collection and provided awareness for DPAM, and we did just that. Adding in the fact that our curation choices uplift artists from underrepresented communities and showcase cultures and shared experiences, DPAM[AR] as a final product is something we are greatly proud of. We aimed to create a user experience unlike anything else any of us have ever made before, working with new technologies and emerging softwares, and successfully created an immersive ARt museum.
See the video demonstration of our experience that we presented at the Jarvis Innovation Center XR Showcase on May 23rd, 2023.
Reflections & Thoughts
Different than most of my previous work, this project has provided me a great deal of education regarding building an experience from scratch. While the DePaul Art Museum knew they wanted a technology-based way to improve museum attendance and awareness of their permanent collection that was as far as the project limitations stretched, leading my team and I to create what would become DPAM[AR] with virtually no constraints as to what our project could be.
Through this experience I have learned a great deal about 3D modeling (LiDAR and Photogrammetry), augmented reality, and the user journey through physical spaces, not just screens. My experiences also highlighted the need to consult experts on various topics throughout a project, especially when you are doing something new - it is so crucial to create multi-disciplinary teams to bring the best expertise to the table.
Because this is the first product I have realized from start to finish, not just creating a prototype ready for development, there were some new challenges I faced that I didn’t have a precedent for how to tackle. Namely, experiencing bugs and technical errors when working with a developing software. The process of testing new technology and working with developers to solve technical issues on the backend was great experience to have - formally communicating issues and working together to solve them will be helpful experience for future projects.
Additionally, creating a product for a client that will be put into practical use was a rewarding new experience I had creating DPAM[AR]. Going back and forth with the museum to create something that utilized our technical abilities to best promote their museum and works has taught me a lot about the iterative client-designer process for projects where the concept is constantly evolving, and the final product is discovered along the way instead of being requested at the start. The most important elements of this process were clear and consistent lines of communication as well as treating the client as the subject matter expert regarding the information you are incorporating into a product.
DPAM[AR] is the project I am most proud of so far, and our team’s collective efforts to turn this idea into something real, tangible, and usable was a challenging, educational, and rewarding experience. Though none of us had previous knowledge of 3D modeling or UX for augmented reality, we created a final deliverable that utilized XR and emerging technology in a new and innovative way.