AR Museum App

role

UX Design

client

AMPL Labs

year

2021

Problem Statement

Due to space limitations, 95% of museum, art collections are kept in storage and not accessible to visitors. The only way to engage with these collections are through online digital archives (usu. indexes of photos, metadata, .CSVs), which they aren’t user-friendly or engaging for most art lovers.

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Market Opportunity

Major Enterprise Customer Base

There are more than 55,000 museums in the world, with 35,000 in North America. Only a small number (~2,500) have virtual web experiences, meaning there’s a big potential market (Google Arts & Culture).

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Huge Digital Collections

The largest museums have significant digital collections that we can leverage for our app:

  • Library of Congress | 17.0 M objects
  • Smithsonian | 37.0M objects
  • British Museum | 4.5M objects

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Massive User Interest

Search queries for online museums surged to an an all-time high during the pandemic!

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Our Solution

Collecting Crave is asset-viewing platform (disguised as a fun, mobile game) that allows you to view an institution’s entire art collection (and more) using augmented reality and 3D modeling.

  • No physical space limitations (display 100% of your collection)
  • Flexible media formats (photos, video, 3D / AR models)
  • Gamifies art experiences, and adds visual, social, emotional components to lifeless digital archives
  • Option to license and display art from other collections
  • Track which objects in digital collection are most popular

We’ve received major grants from the Smithsonian, Mozilla Foundation and others. We’re already working with major museums around the world to validate, test the prototype.

Design Exploration

Here is an interactive embedded Figma file of the UI exploration from wireframes to exploring visual design:

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Final Handoff Design

Here is an interactive embedded Figma file of the handoff designs and final flow for the revise 2.0 version of the application. A few tweaks were made in the final app that are not reflected here.

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Production Process

Our team of four met several times ahead of starting production to plan, dissect, and refine the experience. After the first soft launch we were able to gather feedback and release a second version of the application.

Here is an interactive FigJam board of the plannings meetings we had dissecting was was working and not working in the first app and deciding what changes we were going to make in 2.0:

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Promo Video

Here is an promo video I created talking about the artist's work and intent behind the app: