Aurum leverages immersive storytelling, participatory experiences, and AR technology to deliver scientific knowledge into the palm of your hand and positions you to have a voice in the future of our planet.

Logistics

Aurum is a systems level interaction that is featured in all exhibits at the Carnegie Museum. The interaction below starts at the front desk, follows through onboarding, and then leads you to any exhbit you would like to start with. Below you can see the flow of how we imagined this system to take. We used the Mineral Hall as a case study to envision this AR experience. 

Below is an image of the environment and space of the mineral hall. We took advantage of the loop space shape of this hall while we were designing the info browsing interaction and the AR content for the case and palm level interaction. 

The Experience

01 Arrive at the Museum

Once arriving at the museum, visitors will be givin a stamp that acts as an image marker for their personalized AR object. This object changes as visitors visits each exhibit hall. They also receive AR glasses that help them see the AR content. We chose to design an AR palm object to help visitors be more attached to their object and to learn more about each hall. Below is a small clip to show this process. 

02 Aurum Onboarding

After receiving the stamp and AR glasses you are then ushered into a specific zone where you are introduced to light onboarding to get to know how to interaction with your personalized AR object. It is here where you will learn specific gestures and get a preview of how the AR object will look in your hand.  

Visitors get the opportunity to choose a conflict mineral of their choice and explore the many underpinnings of minerals. Conflict minerals help give users an insight on the many systematic and unjust ways minerals get into our daily products.

This is an example of how the AR object transforms right in front of your hand. This shows the atomic structure of their personalized mineral. This shows how you can really learn about minerals and natural science right in the palm of your hand.

Based on research and user stories, they wanted to hear more about how minerals effect their day to day. We included a human impact lense to teach people how minerals and mineral mining effects human rights, economies and eventually end up in our day to day objects.

As visitors navigate through the space, they can discover their virtual object's physical form and continue exploring more AR- enabled content.

As the visitors make their way towards the end of the exhibit, they are able to engage in a very participatory experience. They can reflect on the exhbit and what they learned about minerals and conflict minerals and hear what others have to say as well.

After reflection you are then invited to explore the rest of the museum and find out more about the exciting exhibits the Carnegie Museum offers. As you can see below there are many different objects visitors can come and know. By learning through AR we can enhance the experience for a user. 

Design Process

Our design process started with an exploratory research phase at the Carnegie Museum. Because we chose a specific hall we visited many times to really get to know ths space and environment.

The biggest take away of this project was learning the work flow from 2d to 3d. From 2D sketches seen above to 3D sketches seen to the side, learning how to work in these programs is one that I will take with me the most.

Reflection & Next Steps

User Research
We have learned to make the most of existing resources by trying our best to harness local and remote participants and gave compensation for their time out-of-pocket. The resulting personas was very helpful to keep us in check and avoid “designer biases”.

AR Prototyping
We spent a lot of time researching AR’s capabilities and limitations. Within a museum, there are a lot of contextual learning challenges that can be difficult to address with AR. Nonetheless, we wanted to push the boundary and leverage the existing framework withinin the museum to help patrons enjoy the exhibit.

Design
During our design iterations, we had a hard time getting feedback on usability because our content weren’t accurate. While we eventually overcame this with generous help from museum professionals, this experience highlighted the weakness of a designer-only team. For me, I was humbled by our research findings that continued to prove wrong our assumptions, highlighting the importance of a research-based, iterative design process.

Next Steps
The critical next step would be circulating the idea with a larger group of stakeholders, including patients. We didn’t reach out to patients for ethical concerns in the design process. However, their feedback would be key to future concept validation and iteration.