What did you draw upon for inspiration?
IS: When I envisioned this experience, it was very important for me to create an AR experience that felt curated and tailored for students. As such, I looked at conventional 2D UI / UX projects and eventually came across an idea to render sprites (which are basically two-dimensional graphic entities) into a 3D canvas with respect to the users’ reality. I like to call this spatial cognizance.
Within the experience, there are two-dimensional images that are anchored into one’s three-dimensional peripheral camera view. Students are able to click on these anchor points in order to jump to different fullscreen experiences.
Another inspiration was the realization that previous generations were exposed to knowledge very linearly. By this I mean that, until now, students have been reliant on receiving visual information through a two-dimensional, linear world — even though in most cases, the people and events they were learning about lived in and impacted a three-dimensional world.
Previously, if students were reading a book about a past hero like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., for example, each page was a 2D representation of something Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. did or said. Each page could only hold so much in its collective body of information. And each body of information lived permanently on a page. Even if students were watching a video on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., students were still confined to a two-dimensional displaying medium like a television or computer screen.
Thus, in creating this project, it was really important for me to think of AR in a way that could be a gateway for students to learn laterally rather than linearly — to add another layer with infinite possibilities, and infinite perspectives.