Plaster ReCast

Carnegie Museum of Art has the second largest collection of plaster casts in the world. However, visitors rarely stop at the Hall of Architecture and fully appreciate the artifacts. Plaster ReCast was an ambitious project to deliver to the museum a proof of concept of an engaging AR experience in 16 weeks.

My Role

I led UX of this project from User Research, Interaction and Visual Design, to the Usability Testing of the final working product.

Besides the curators at Carnegie Museum of Art, I worked alongside a Producer, a 3D Artist, a Content Creator, and two Software Engineers.

Plaster ReCast was launched in Fall 2017 at CMoA, Pittsburgh.

The Challenges

In 16 weeks, make visitors fall in love with architecture

Our goal was to engage visitors more with the artifacts in the Hall of Architecture with AR technology. However, we didn’t want to simply throw on the AR markers and CAD models. Instead, it was important for us to inspire a sense of exploration in both digital content and physical environment, without taking away the traditional museum experience.

Our high-level goals were to

1. Make the experience engaging and educative for all visitors

2. Create 'wow' moments during their visit

3. Hand over the museum a platform for further research and innovation

The platform and hardware suggested by the museum was Google Tango.

Kickoff

Early insights from the field

To understand the factors that kept visitors away, we interviewed 6 participants and observed their visits in the museum. The main problems discovered were:

1. The layout of exhibition was overwhelming, yet scattered

2. Visitors didn’t have a way to dive in, but only to browse the wall

3. Lack of historical and geometric context

The visitors were usually eager to learn more, but clueless about where to find the information.

The approach

Design, prototype, test, and do it again

After group brainstorm over the field research insight, I quickly sketched out the user journey and concept screens. I spent one week iterating on 3 major versions based on user tests with paper prototypes, before finally moving on to a higher fidelity version.

Interactions

Sometimes it doesn't make sense on paper

Due to the nature of AR, certain concepts were hard to interpret on paper or static digital files. At week 5, I created an interactive prototype on InVision to test out the user flow, but all the screens with a  camera view failed to communicate the context to users. 

Working with our engineers, I tested the basic interactions with digital prototypes created in Unity. Users responded very positively to them.

The launch

Architecture dream coming true

In the fall of 2017, Plaster ReCast app launched at CMoA during Copy + Paste, an eight-month interactive investigation and exhibition at the museum’s spectacular Hall of Architecture.