The Archive: Idea Proposal

The idea for The Archive came from our trip around the Royal Green Jackets museum. On our trip, we quickly discovered that a majority of the artifacts shown contained a lot of text that was not very interesting to us as visitors. Therefore we used this experience to develop our product.

The Archive would be used as an Augmented Reality Mobile App that would allow visitors to interact with specific artifacts in the museum. If a user was to come across an artifact supported by the device, they could use the camera technology on either their smartphone, tablet ect to load a 3D model of that artifact. The user would aim their camera at either a QR Code or AR Base set either in front or around the real artifact and would load up the 3D model on their mobile device. Loading this up on the application would allow the user to interact with it by using the touch screen to rotate, zoom and move the the artifact in real-time. Supporting this would be a small tab on the side of the screen that would allow the user to access additional information related to that artifact.

One example of this would be a Victoria Cross medal. Once the user has loaded the 3D Model, they would be able to look at information such as who owned it, when they earned it and how they earned it. As a group, we strongly believed that some of these artifacts were losing their meaning when placed behind a glass cabinet. We knew that each medal would have a specific story behind it and it became one of our main prerogatives to ensure that each story should be told to the visitors of the museum.

The product’s main focus would be the inclusion of these 3D Artifacts however there would be a limited number of them spread throughout the museum. This is because we wouldn’t have the initial resources to create a 3D replica of every single artifact in the museum. To add onto this, we believe that not every single artifact would be in the visitors interests. Therefore we would pick the best 2 or 3 from each area of the museum and use those. Obviously in time this has the potential to grow and expand but for the foreseeable future of the application, we would just focus on these limited numbers of them. These artifacts would be sorted into their respective time zones, so we felt like they could be sorted into a timeline in the actual application itself. This would be so that the user could keep track of each artifact they have come across some but not all the available interactive pieces.