Melbourne DigiTours

After the closure of most physical activities due to Covid-19 we investigated ways that we could reimagine art projects in a digital sense in an attempt to reopen the city of Melbourne. After investigating some gamified historical tours, I used my personal experience using one of these apps to determine some possible improvements and decided to try and implement a similar idea to tours that this did not yet exist for.
The final result was a single platform that could be used to open a number of different digital augmented reality tours in order to offer both on site and at home historical activities.

The idea involves creating a website where the tours can be both browsed and purchased but primarily works for search engine optimisation, the idea behind this being that when looking for tours, people rarely check the app store first and will opt to jump onto a search engine for ideas. However, after finding the tour via the website, people are then prompted to download the app.

The app then lets the user log into their account to access their purchased tours, which will then be played using augmented reality. Whether onsite scanning in the specified objects/calibrating the AR objects to the right room or even just dropping the narrative into their living room, the app will then begin replaying an interactive story of their choosing. This can work as either a fully interactive game or even just an immersive retelling of stories where you get to recreate the events as they unfold.

This single platform idea solved a few of the issues that arose from my investigations. Most tours are offered as individual apps, meaning you have to not only find but install a number of apps in order to use them. This meant taking up a lot of space on your phone but also limiting access to anyone that may have decided to do this tour on short notice.
From a development point of view, this also meant each specific tour would need to create and then maintain a number of different apps, an issue that has previously resulted in the project being shut down for some museums that were unable to maintain the upkeep of running a digital app.
From my experience using some of these apps, I frequently found that there was a period of learning when first introduced to the app user interface. Sometimes the buttons or symbols didn’t quite make sense and would result in me opening a window I didn’t intend to. By making this a single app with the same user interface, this results in the location and functions of buttons becoming learned due to them remaining in the same place regardless of the tour.

Although I don’t have any app development experience, I enjoyed the process of creating the idea and then slowly designing how it would look on a phone as well as investigating if some locations would benefit from this type of app more than others as it has allowed me to think critically for things that I have previously not done in this course.
Watching some of the other projects presented within this class makes me think that I could really benefit from some digital design/software design experience as there was a noticeable difference in the quality of the presentations given from those that had a more polished looking app.

Overall, I really enjoyed the experience and am happy with the overall idea I created as I definitely think that it would be something I would find both useful and enjoyable in my personal life, which I think makes it successful from an educational game perspective.

Melbourne DigiTours – Assignment 4 submission