From Jan Rothuizen’s AR(t) exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum.
There are virtually limitless ways and reasons to use augmented reality, but one of our favorite use cases on the Layar platform so far is art and augmenting museums.
A healthy number of museum-related layers already exist on the Layar platform. The Andy Warhol Museum layer displays important Warhol points around the city of Pittsburgh, Jan Rothuizen’s ARtours layer augments the Stedelijk Museum here in Amsterdam and Sander Veenhof and Mark Skwarek’s “uninvited” exhibition is on display at MoMa in New York City.
While most of our early adopters have focused on art museums, AR has a massive amount of potential for all types of museums.
Yesterday we told you about an interactive scavenger hunt going on in Dublin, Ireland that is using Layar to help players find treasures and win prizes. These types of hunts fit nicely into the realm of Augmented Reality whether the players are searching for digital tokens or for actual educational information.
“Expeditie Deventer” (Expedition Deventer) is an interesting new project that uses Layar to focus on the latter of these two examples - helping people, namely high school students, learn more about the city of Deventer. The game was commissioned by the Public Library Deventer to teach students about the past, present and future of the city and to establish the library as the city’s information center.
The game is played by a group of students split into two teams - one which stays inside at the library and another which roams the streets of Deventer hunting down clues. The students use Layar on their smartphones to complete tasks, earn points, communicate and - most importantly - discover the city in a new way.
3D objects, images and videos can be found in various places throughout the city to help the students solve the questions and assignments. The inside team takes the clues discovered outside and researches them at the library using the Internet or other library resources.
The Expeditie Deventer project was recently awarded the prize for best online education application at the 2010 Dutch Digitaal Erfgoed (Digital Heritage) conference - a testament to the educational value that can be produced through Augmented Reality. Layar is a powerful platform for creating unique educational experiences, and its accessibility on smartphones adds an extra level of appeal to the youth in this case.
