Harbin ARcollage
An app for tourists in Harbin, China to interact with historic architecture and culture through AR technology.
#Academic Project #Individual Project #Mobile #Augmented Reality
Roles
I am the UX and AR interaction designer leading the process of user research, ideation, design and prototyping.
Problems
Overcommercialization covered the history of Harbin Central Ave, and it’s challenging for tourists and local people to learn about the culture from what’s available today.
Techniques
Secondary Research, Competitive Analysis, Wireframing, Prototyping, Usability Test
Objective
An app for tourists in Harbin to help people learn more detailed information onsite, and collage their own memory of the city as a special souvenir through AR technology.
01 Context
Merging modernity and historic preservation remains to be a challenge on Harbin Central Avenue.
The saying, "If you haven't been to Central Avenue, you haven't been to Harbin", underscores the role of Central Avenue as a city symbol.
A strong sense of history intertwined with modern vibrancy attracts both locals and tourists. However, merging modernity and historic preservation remains to be a challenge .
02 Secondary Research
Both tourists and locals worry that overcommercialization is covering the original historic and cultural vibe of Harbin Central Avenue.
First, the unique cultural vibe is gone with overcommercialization.
Historic buildings have been transformed into shops from inside out, squeezing out those ones which actually well represent the local culture and transforming a unique cultural avenue to an ordinary business street that can be seen anywhere.
Overcommercialized Avenue Today
Commercial elements on historic facades on the main avenue
Unique Cultural Street that Keeps the Style from the 1940s
Black Can, a coffee shop on the side street of Central Avenue district
It’s commonly seen that tourists and locals often complain about this on social media. In the Harbin Municipal Tourism Bureau's satisfaction survey about the Central Avenue, more than 70% of tourists said they hope to see more contents related to Harbin's history and culture, rather than excessive commercialization.
Limited on-site information about heritage buildings makes it challenging for visitors to learn about the history of Central Avenue.
First, there is limited on-site information about heritage buildings shown to the public.
The boards on the buildings only have basic text information, like name, construction time, historical function, and style. But visitors also hope to see more vivid stories, details, changes and images through the decades.
Black Boards Hung on Heritage Buildings with Basic Text Information
Second, there is little map to help visitors locate where they are.
Roads and streets cross with each other, creating a complicated district which is difficult for visitors to tell where they are and should move in the district. And there is little map on site to give an overview.
The Only Heritage Building Map at the Entrance of Central Avenue
Can’t help people when they getting lost in the district with so many crossings
Second, the inappropriate renovation makes the situation even worse.
The exterior facades of historic buildings were painted in various bright colors, which led to the loss of the authenticity of the historic information and the failure to restore it as it was before.
Heritage Buildings Lose Authenticity in Bright Colors
These are registered heritage buildings constructed in the 1920s, originally used as medicine store, bank and city hall from left to right.
People complain about the renovation work that makes the historic buildings look inauthentic and the district look fragmented.
03 Understand the Visitors
Based on the secondary research, I concluded mainly two visitor groups in user persona below to better understand user needs and pain points.
User Persona
Group 1 is like Hua, a resident in Harbin, who wants to learn about the history behind the buildings systematically.
Group 2 is like Fang, a young traveler, who wants to have more interesting interactions with the site and document the travel in their own way.
04 Design Goals
After summarizing the user needs and pain points, I summarized a “How Might We“ and several design goals as following:
How Might We create an engaging and interactive experience for people to learn, play and enjoy?
And my design goals are:
🎯 1. to provide systematic and authentic information about buildings on Central Avenue;
🎯 2. to provide mapping service that can help visitors locate where they are when visiting the place;
🎯 3. to enable more interactions between visitors and the place, making their trip more enjoyable and impressive through gamification.
05 Brainstorming
With a clear mind of design goals, I brainstormed 3 medium ideas and scored them 1 - 5 in the following criteria:
Interaction: how much visitors can interact with the place through it;
Information Amount: how informative it is;
Accessibility: how easily visitors can access the entry to it;
On-site Experience: how satisfied visitors are when using it on site;
Off-site Experience: how satisfied visitors are when using it off site.
Based on the scoring, I decided to move forward with the “AR Mobile App” because it scores most. The AR technology also refers back to my design goal—interactive and engaging—better than other ideas.
In order to understand more about AR technology’s limitation, feasibility and application, I conducted competitor analysis of 6 products and summarized the key learnings as following.
Competitor Analysis
In general, here are 3 takeaways from the competitor analysis:
All have the map service and detailed infomation page for destinations or museum objects, so this proves my design goals 1 and 2 are reasonable and feasible;
AR technology is mainly used for scanning and navigation, which is more interactive than VR visits and audio guide, so I still choose AR technology;
App’s spotlight features are necessary for attracting users, like 3D modelling historic scene and puzzle game, so I will also design a gamified feature that provides unique visiting experiences.
Critical User Journey
To summarize, I will focus on designing the following 3 major user journeys answering to user needs as stated before:
📌AR scan to show 3D models
Then we used Unity+Vuforia AR to simulate the process of AR scanning a building facade then show digital 3D models. We simplified the facade structure into black and white targets for Vuforia AR.
More vivid in our video:
📌Feasibility: Project 3D Models in Real Scenes
We referenced The Met Unframed and learned that AR projecting digital 3D models in real life scenes is feasible both indoors and ourdoors.
06 Design Solutioning
Technological Details
📌Generate 3D Models
We took photos of several heritage buildings on Central Avenue and used Autodesk Recap Photo to generate digital 3D models through “photogrammetry”. The key point is that every photo has 70% overlap with each other.
Low-Fidelity Prototype
Usability Test and Iterations
I invited several users to do usability testing and iterated the low-fi design.
Iteration 01: Add a filter to help quickly find items.
Iteration 02: Make every image in “Visual History” more accessible.
Iteration 03: Give users instructions of some interactions in the AR Scan feature.
07 Delivery
Map Service
fitting Design Goal 2: to provide mapping service that can help visitors locate where they are when visiting the place.
Learn More
fitting Design Goals 1:
to provide systematic and authentic information about buildings on Central Avenue;
The concept of visual design is inspired by “Museum”, to give users the experience just like they are wandering in an architectural art museum.
AR Scan
fitting Design Goal 3:
to enable more interactions between visitors and the place.
Collection Box & AR Create
fitting Design Goal 3: to enable more interactions between visitors and the place, making their trip more enjoyable and impressive through gamification.
08 Future Iterations
⛳ Precise digital 3D models: The precision of 3D models which the project use is crucial to the visual effect of the app. So if there is more time, I would like to try drone photography to acquire more photos of buildings as detailed as possible in order to produce nice building models;
⛳ Interactive AR gamification: City collage is only one setting to use generated 3D models. Given more time, I would like to provide multiple settings for users to choose, such as taking selfies with heritage buildings to make this app stand out and improve user stickiness;
⛳ Architectural details and interior scenes: They are also important parts of Central Avenue but covered by modern elements and almost gone. Representing them by putting categories named “interior“ and “detail“ in addition to “building“ and ”food” is also a way to preserve the historic information.