ARKit: The Girl in the Painting
Experience Designer | Carnegie Mellon University ETC Class Project | Oct 2017
The prompt for this project was to prototype an interactive experience that was story-driven. Emphasis was placed on designing meaningful interactions that aligned with the theme of the world and related to the guest’s impact on the narrative. We decided to use ARKit as our platform and invited our guests to step into a new world through the screen of an iPad.
What is not shown in the video below, is a moment at the end of the experience in which an actress steps out of a real world door, dressed as the character from the painting, appearing to just escaped from the AR painting world.
This experience contains three interaction types. First the guest needs to move through the frame of a painting into the painting world via the iPad. We felt having multiple realities played to the strengths of ARKit. It works well at allowing users to enter a new dimension.
Second, the guest can paint the world they enter. Because the experience is themed around painting, it was an important that our main interaction support that theme.
Third, we included a touch interaction that always fails. The girl attempts to reach out to the guest but is blocked by the screen of the iPad. It separates her from the guest's world. This interaction was included to demonstrate that the girl is still alienated from the guest. She is seeking interaction but will need a state-change. The final moment of this experience has the guest paint an exit for girl, so that she can leave her painting and step into the real world.
At this point an actress emerges through a door in the demo space, and thanks the player for helping her into their world. This was an important final touch in the merging of two realities. I story-boarded and scripted this project, wrote the music, recorded audio, and assisted with creating assets and art directing.