Gold award for Geelong immersive heritage project

Deakin University’s MInD (Mediated Intelligence in Design) Lab has received a gold award at the 2020 Melbourne Design Awards for its latest project Experiencing (In)tangible Heritage Through eXtended Reality.

In partnership with the City of Greater Geelong, the project is part of the newly revitalised Western Beach Park in Geelong, which draws on the area’s extensive industrial and leisure past. It is the first open-air digital exhibition in urban public space through application of mobile AR technology which aims to seamlessly integrate intangible/tangible heritage data into everyday city experience.

The project explores representational possibilities through immersive/locative media technologies and interactive storytelling to imaginatively connect people with location’s forgotten histories.
The reconstructed stories of the last 200 years, told through application of various visual and auditory means, are activated through an augmented reality app designed to trigger the right story at the right time based on the visitor’s location while using the smart device.

The app represents accessible medium for collective local engagement. While traditional AR – one device and one user – is not inherently collaborative, the proposed app provides a platform for people to connect through story-sharing. As such, on-site experience extends into collective communication/collaboration, where people not only share personal impressions but learn about and comment stories of others through the platform. Exchange of testimonials happens directly through the app by image upload/voice recording/text typing/text editing.

As the Smart City initiative of the City of Greater Geelong pushes towards more participatory models for citizen engagement, the proposed project provides an alternative method as technological platform to facilitate bottom-up, participatory and co-creative community involvement in future digital place-making.