Phase Three: The Idea

Phase Three - Planning

9th - 15th August

As with the design of anything that is to be used by a variety of people, we were faced with the inherent challenge of how to best create it in so that it is functional and user friendly. In a paradox it almost has to be simple and complicated: complicated so that it performs a wide variety of function and offers a lot of features but is packaged in a way that is intuitive and the user is unaware of the complexity. Each of us attempted to devise a flowchart style visualization as to how our app could be structured and navigated.

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Phase Four - The Idea

9th - 15th August

In our case, in order to create a successful app, we need to devise a way of navigating simultaneously through the physical space and the content. The idea came when we came across online visual brainstorm and thesaurus.

Visuwords and Visual Thesaurus show a visual way of visually exploring concepts and ideas and links between them. This prompted the idea that what if we could create this sort of visual concept navigation in combination with the navigation. Such a solution offers a way for the user to navigate through the spaces they browse topics, themes, artworks, artistic elements they are interested in while immediately seeing them placed in the physical space.

To achieve this, we plan to integrate the use of Unity 3D. This software enables us to take a 3D render of the gallery space which we can make up in a 3D modeling software (e.g. Maya, 3DS MAX) and set up camera movement and other features commonly integrated into 3D games. But what's more than that is that is can be easily converted to an Xcode file to upload to iPhone. Hence, this would enable us to take advantage of the hardware features of the iPhone for navigating through the space, such as, the accelerometer to tilt to navigate or the touch gestures.

The visual brain storm would take the form of 'bubbles' in the 3D space. The user can 'follow' the ideas and bubble which would lead them to works and then reveal more about the works.

For the initial deployment of this project, it would act independent of the user's actual physical location. In the long term implementation of this project, ideally some sort of real time location tracker would make the navigation more natural. That is, it would be able to place which room the viewer was standing in by bluetooth, GPS, IR, RFID or similar, and in combination with hardware such as the gyro and accelerometer, the map could update real time to accurately reflect location.

Even at this stage, it can offer the viewer to skip ahead and plan out which direction they want to head in. For those confused by the interface or the bubbles, there is the option of narrowing down what strings of bubbles they want to see, turn them off completely to see just the artwork titles or switch to simple overhead view for more traditional mode of navigation.

The effect of augmenting the gallery space in such a way creates an interaction and dialogue not just between the viewer and the works, but also between the works and the space. It is not often one gets to see the relationships between the works when in fact, a lot of work has gone into curating exhibitions around such dialogues and connections. We have been told by the client that the works in the permanent collection tell the story of New Zealand and so by presenting the works in such a way, it deepens the understanding of the collection as a whole, rather than just as standalone works.

The next phases are in fact to be the most time consuming. There are many elements we have to bring together, in particular the Unity 3D interface and learning the language of iPhone apps. The conceptual frame work and technical structure are both vital to realize this project.