Life onboard
During my internship at the Danish War Museum, I was tasked with creating a prototype that demonstrated how augmented reality could be used to teach visitors about life on Danish war ships in the 1700’s. For this project, the ship Fyen from 1736 was chosen by museum leadership to be used as an example.
Designing the concept
The first step of the design process was to visit the War Museum to see Fyen and the space around it, as well as gathering more information about the project.
Target audience:
Families
- children, parents and grandparents
Restrictions:
Covid lockdown: on-site user testing and museum visits are rare.
Movable design: because of the lockdown, prototypes had to be made from home and brought to the museum for testing.
Future location unknown: Fyen was to be moved to an unknown location in the future, which meant thet the prototype should only require Fyen to function. It should also be easy for staff to bring the prototype with Fyen to the new location.
Space-conscious: The prototype should remain simple and not rely on a larger area being available around Fyen, since it was unknown how much space the new location would have.
Measuring Fyen
1 m 73 cm
3 m 91 cm
4 m
Project here
The final design
Small images on Fyen’s display case function as windows into the past, playing animations of everyday moments from the ship when scanned in augmented reality. This design would only require Fyen, images for the display and the museum’s tablets to scan them in order to work, meaning it would take up little space and be easily movable.
Additionally, the concept of having visitors find and scan images is similar to games like Pokemon Go and Ingress, both of which appeal to children and adults.
Sails
Deck
Markers on display case are scanned
Living conditions
Sketch of concept with places on the ship that could potentially be scanned.
In collaboration with museum staff, I decided to focus on the difference between the living conditions of the sailors and the captain since it was within scope and gave insight into how differently they were treated. To do this I created two animations, one showing where sailors spent most of their time (top) and one showing the Captain’s quarters (bottom). The animations were drawn with the colour palette of old photographs to give visitors a feeling of looking back in time.
Lastly, the images that visitors would scan were created and placed on the display. These were kept visually simple to make them as easy for a phone or tablet camera to scan as possible. For this prototype I used an app called Overly for augmented reality.
