Ethnographic Practices of Listening - AR Poster

As part of our hub spoke model, we were approached to talk about the use of augmented reality posters. This came about after an informal chat over coffee about what's new in the technology world.

Allison Boggis was interested in utilising UCS' Connect app (Based on Aurasma's AR technology) to make a conference/lecture poster more interactive. When it was agreed the Elevate Team would support this as a case study to determine workflows and point to point turn around time, we sat down with Allison for a chat to begin the process. The chat covered aspects such as size, content and how many AR elements there would be on the poster, however, a large portion was talking about limitations of the technology, I'll rephrase that, talking about 'best practice' for using this technology. Size of the triggers had to be considered, how small can we go? The length of the content (In this case video). How much space dedicated to user instruction on the poster compared to the main content text etc..

• A2 Poster


• Trigger image height no higher than a PostIt note (easy reference)


• 3 Short videos less than 1:30 in length.

We were happy we had a plan, an A2 poster with three AR elements which would be videos of Allison extending and reflecting on the content of the poster. A date was set when we could record the video. A simple HD camcorder and wireless lapel mic were used to capture the three videos in different settings. The next step was to design the poster, a free stock bokeh background was used. One thing we did want to do was to capture the first frame of each video and use that as our trigger image (The area scanned to view the video), this we feel helps bring the poster to life as as soon as the user scans the trigger the image starts to move, unlike having a different image which then suddenly changes when the video plays.

Once the review process had been completed with Allison for the poster design we moved onto adding the AR to the poster using Aurasma's developer studio, this was a quick process.

The overall process was completed over a two week period, totalling roughly 8 man hours on this project.

The result was a visually appealing poster integrated with augmented reality technology, this we feel is a great pre-cursor to stepping into the more student involved teaching and learning aspect of using this type of technology.

Here is a shot of the poster in action (albeit impossible to capture video in a still image).



If you would like know more or have a chat with the Elevate Team about this type of technology use the contact us option on this blog.