ARt offers a fusion of physical street art and digital 360 AR for iOS and Android addressing issues raised by Covid-19 restrictions on street art tourism and offering enhanced street art experience moving forward.
Following the impact of Covid-19 on art tourism to Belfast city centre and the opportunity for arts and creatives to produce new socially distanced engagements with the public, project lead Deepa Mann-Kler, CEO of Neon and her team researched and developed a new app to facilitate tourist facing projects. Neon in partnership with Aura Digital Studios, Italic Pig and Yellow Design developed, with funding from Future Screens NI’s Rewriting the Narrative award a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) creating an AR experience for one piece of street art, “Deep Love” by ADW Art on Dunbar Street in the Cathedral Quarter. The Belfast city centre project introduced a model for future implementations in Belfast and beyond. Once tourism starts again, ARt will encourage visitors to extend the length of time spent with and enhance visitor experience of the street art itself with potential to expand in scale across the city and beyond. The project facilitates future projects and apps using new digital content for tourism marketing promotional purposes to encourage virtual and online visitors to find and encounter new experiences.
App link: https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/deep-love-art/id1559787151
Partnerships:
Aura Digital Studios is an independent, interdisciplinary animation studio based in Belfast. https://www.auradigitalstudios.com
Italic Pig are award-winning indie game and animation developers based in Holywood, Northern Ireland. One recent production is Paleo Pines, a dinosaur themed ranching game developed by in partnership with Irregular Corporation and NI Screen. https://www.italicpig.com/
Neon is a creative immersive technologies company creating experiences in virtual, augmented and mixed realities. Recent awards include the Royal Television Society Finalist RETNE “Interactive Entertainment” 2017 and WinTech Series Finalist “Tech Start Up Of the Year” 2018. https://www.discoverneon.com
Yellow Design is a design firm based in Belfast and Dublin, experienced in Augmented Visualisation and tooling as well as immersive Virtual Environments. Recent Belfast projects include Titanic: Back in Belfast. https://www.yellowdesign.tv