Jacky Doll, IBM
Rebecca Rouse, RPI
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This presentation describes an undergraduate and graduate advanced special topics course, “Mobile Augmented Reality Design” as an example of intersectional engineering and liberal arts pedagogy in practice. Lessons learned from offering the course will be shared, as well as plans for the future. The course centers on a hands-on design experience, structured around collaboration with an outside client, which provides students with real-world design and development experience before graduation. Students work in teams to design, code, and create all aspects of functioning prototype mobile AR apps for museums and cultural heritage. AR is presented as a medium uniquely capable of making invisible history visible, and students are immersed not only in the project development process but also relevant media history and design theory. Students deep dive into the historical precedents of mixed reality technologies, are introduced to a variety of artistic and HCI design approaches, and also focus on the particular historical materials relevant to their team projects.
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“Below Stairs: AR History Adventure”, one student project from the most recent cohort of this course, was selected by the client, The Rensselaer County Historical Society, for further development and permanent, public display at their historic house museum in downtown Troy, NY. “Below Stairs” is set in the 1850s when the Hart family was in residence and is based on extensive historical documentation. Users play the part of a new under-servant in the household on a trial day, and must interact with virtual characters and explore the house to complete a series of tasks, to determine if they will be offered the job. The AR application provides users an opportunity to develop a different relationship to the site, and to develop a kinesthetic understanding of the meaning of the site and the history represented there.