Exploring Location-Based AR Narrative Design for Historic Site

Abstract

Abstract The Pickrick Protests is a project exploring the use of Augmented Reality (AR) to recreate a sequence of Civil Rights--era incidents that occurred at the Pickrick restaurant, in Atlanta, over a period of 8 months in 1964–1965. This project gives a connected and chronological narrative of the historic events to form a cohesive experience, with AR projections of computer graphic depictions of the 1960s buildings, and events on the site where they happened. The objective of this project is to make the history of the Civil Rights Movement visible by privileging the perspective of the African Americans who fought for equality. This paper focuses on introducing the narrative design for this location-based AR application (Bowman et al., 1998). We will discuss our approach to creating a meaningful narrative within the technical affordances and environmental constraints of the AR medium and the specific location. The design challenges posed by this project were how to merge the virtual content with the existing, albeit changed, physical space; how to recenter the story on the activists rather than on the segregationist restaurant owner who went on to become a governor of Georgia; and how to direct attention in AR in order to allow interactors to follow a multiepisode narrative, and to focus on the nonviolent activists rather than the aggressive segregationists.