Flypad: Designing Trajectories in a Large-Scale Permanent Augmented Reality Installation

Abstract

A long-term naturalistic study reveals how artists designed,visitors experienced, and curators and technicians maintained a publicinteractive artwork over a four year period. The work consisted of acollaborative augmented reality game that ran across eleven networkeddisplays (screens and footpads) that were deployed along a winding ramp in apurpose-built gallery. Reflections on design meetings and documentation showhow the artists responded to this architectural setting and addressed issuesof personalisation, visitor flow, attracting spectators, linking real andvirtual, and accessibility. Observations of visitors reveal that while theirinteractions broadly followed the artists’ design, there was far moreflexible engagement than originally anticipated, especially within visitinggroups, while interviews with curators and technicians reveal how the workwas subsequently maintained and ultimately reconfigured. Our findings extenddiscussions of `interactional trajectories' within CSCW, affirming therelevance of this concept to describing collaboration in cultural settings,but also suggesting how it needs to be extended to better reflect groupinteractions at multiple levels of scale.