In thinking of physical objects that would work well in AR space, I came across sheet music and couldn’t really shake the idea of how nicely it would work in AR. As someone who’s kept sheet music around for various instruments, one frustration was that sometimes my brain just couldn’t wrap my head around how something was supposed to sound. If I could point my phone at the sheet and have a snippet played for me, it would be able to pick up where I left off right away, just a quick boost to keep my progress up. Here’s a video mockup of what I had in mind.

This was just a quick mockup to get a look going. After looking at it a few times, I think that a further iteration would have individual notes changing color as opposed to the whole bar for more specificity. Maybe some kind of playhead on a timeline would be helpful if the user wanted to go over a specific part.

This is a project that I started back in the beginning of Quarantine but never got back to. I did one quarantine journal entry from my kitchen, and filmed a few more but never built them out in AR. Here I used a generic image tracker on my kitchen island to trigger a video of me cooking in the kitchen. The idea with this project was that someday, maybe long after I passed away, someone could visit my apartment, and if the trackers were placed properly, this visitor could see what it was like for me during the Covid-19 Quarantine.

I would love to create something that allows people to easily create and place AR versions of themselves. I initially came to this idea and as way to agitate gentrification. The thinking is that when people are priced out of a neighborhood, after the immediate concerns of finding housing and rebuilding their lives, there’s got to be a fear that everything that they did to contribute to the neighborhood would also be erased. There are memories and stories that gentrification erases forever. Even someone who dies in a neighborhood at least has the chance of being remembered as a ghost. That’s it, AR Ghosts!

If you have a a resident who has been, or is about to be, priced out, what if that person gave a walking tour of the neighborhood as it is/used to be. This would serve multiple purposes:

1. Celebrates the culture that exists/existed in the space before the gentrifiers

2. Informs conscious gentrifiers of the culture that they should learn to honor instead of replace

3. Serves as a “Fuck You” to gentrifiers who don’t care about the damage they do

Showing these 3 images to a classmate was somewhat helpful. They understood what was happening in each frame. They understood that the first frame was the start of an experience, but didn’t quite recognize that the street sign was being scanned to get it going. The next two frames, it was clear to them that the person in the frame of the phone was added in AR and not really on the street with the person holding the phone.

They liked the concept of taking people from neighborhoods that have been, or in danger of being gentrified and having someone native to that neighborhood sharing a narrative that captures the culture of the place as it was (before it’s replaced.).