Talking Houses - Storytelling and Hunt Games in Augmented Reality

Augmented Reality (AR) opens novel possibilities for how users can experience and interact with the world around them. Especially for tourism, AR can be used to bring monuments and buildings to life with virtual characters to learn more about the history of a place. Talking Houses is an augmented reality mobile application that allows users to interact with virtual characters in the old town of Zurich, called Niederdorf. The app was created as an applied research collaboration between the Media Technology Center, ETH Zurich, and the Zurich University of Arts (ZHdK), Cast/Visual Media.

Goals

We explored transforming the city landscape into an AR experience by providing iconic characters for famous buildings to increase the engagement of users with Point of Interests (POIs). We were also interested in combining the artistic viewpoint with the technological one, to create novel and engaging AR applications by collaborating with the Zurich University of Arts.

Outcomes

We built a mobile application that contains two experiences:

• The Scavenger Hunt. We developed an AR scavenger hunt experience in the old town of Zurich. The experience starts at the Stussihof fountain, where the user is tasked with finding 3 nearby buildings. A virtual character appears in front of each building and starts talking to the user, while also providing hints to the next destination.
• The Square. In this experience, the user remains at one square in the old town of Zurich and interacts with various characters that appear in front of the surrounding buildings. Each character tells stories about its corresponding building and area.