A team from UCL are through to the second stage of a competition led by Snap Inc, Microsoft Research and BBC R&D international challenge to reimagine the future of storytelling with Augmented Reality. Teams have been tasked to take a multi-disciplinary and multi-cultural approach to reveal AR as the next major storytelling platform.

The UCL team is led by Professor Simon Julier, Professor Dinah Lammiman and Professor Yvonne Rogers. The team comprises two Human Computer Interaction PhD students: Sheena Visram (team lead) and Kuba Maruszczyk, two Masters students in Immersive Factual Storytelling: Yige Guo and Yinggui Yang and one PhD student in Virtual Environments: Dan Archer.

The team are exploring how to bring creative storytelling into public spaces and people’s everyday lives through augmented reality. Their focus will be on public health education in waiting areas at Great Ormond Street Hospital. Through engagement with hospital guides and healthcare professionals they have already started to apply human centred design principles to create a mobile AR technology companion that will educate and enchant children about prominent healthcare topics.

Students will show case their work through lightening pitches and mini-exhibitions at an event co-hosted at ACM IMX 2020 in Barcelona, Spain in June 2020. Teams will be judged on the novelty, topical alignment and feasibility of their solutions. The event will culminate in a meta-discussion on the challenges and opportunities revealed by the project, future funding openings and community-building efforts around AR and storytelling.  The project will finish with the publication of a position paper drawing on the experiences of all participants.