For my proposal, I would like to bring festival posters to life using augmented reality. Many festival posters are full of so much life and bright colours, most of them have people or objects within the design which would make it a more exciting experience for the viewer if animated/3D versions of the people/objects popped out at them. This idea is also a good marketing technique as this opportunity will entice more customers or will increase mentioning of said festival. Big companies and brands are more reliable when their audience are able to engage more with their products.
I have created some personas of typical festival goers. this is the audience I aim to attract with my AR festival poster. The aimed audience will be young adults, aging from 18-30, the type of people that enjoy partying, raves and festivals. The younger generation also stay up to date with the technology growth so it is likely that they will enjoy engaging with a poster that has built-in AR.
After experimenting with the three different immersive design topics, I decided to delve further into augmented reality. The AR spoke out to me more than the others because I enjoy the concept of layering digital and 3D media to something flat/2D instead of having an entire environment be virtual. For me, virtual reality is very overwhelming and quite scary, so it wasn’t something I wanted to carry on learning. Being able to find that in between of normal reality and virtual reality is the best idea for me, hence the AR.
Augmented reality can range from having 3D animations pop out when a product is triggered, perhaps by a phone, to facial recognition technology. It is likely that everyone has experienced the use of AR at least once in their life, it is growing drastically within today’s society. The social media platforms we use all seem to offer facial filters to alter the appearance of the live camera.
To further explain this concept, face filters can be seen on most social media platforms i.e., Snapchat, TikTok and Instagram. These filters work using facial recognition and tracking technology. Behind the scenes, these facial filters are created using an Active Face Model, ‘The Active Face Model is a facial model that has been trained by the manual marking of the borders of facial features on hundreds to thousands of images.’ (Le).
Another good example of AR that uses an Active Face Model are the virtual try-ons that some companies offer. With the growth of technology today, big brands and companies are using AR to help costumers engage more with their products and online services. Over the past couple of years, make-up and clothing brands have been allowing customers to virtually try-on their products. Allowing customers to do this, helps them find their perfect fit and saves time and conflict when it comes to an item not being the right size.
I captured my own video through snapchat to show how accurate these face filters are. They detect where my features are and work around them, it’s also amazing how when I turn my head, the filter turns with me, following my face. Although this isn’t the category of AR that I need for my production piece idea, it was very intriguing to learn more about it and can be useful for other future projects.
An example of AR that is similar to the work I want to produce is the Aria app (“The ARIA Network – Welcome to the World of ARIA”). This app allows users to point their camera at posters and vinyl records and they will be presented with funky visuals. I downloaded their app and tested this out on a popular vinyl, when doing this I was presented with an animation and audio, it was a very pleasant and satisfying experience. This idea is also really good for increased record sales.
I came to find another company that have already created AR posters. A company called ‘Space Store’ that sell AR posters. This website is accompanied by a free app that is used to view AR aspect of their posters when directly pointed at them. They offer a range of space themed posters that show 3D planet animations when the user is in the app.
After researching the topic, I want to explore more I found a good example of a festival poster that would look better with AR, which are the Parklife posters. Parklife posters are so busy and chaotic, it’s almost as if the objects are already jumping out of the posters. When I look at their posters, I imagine all the people dancing, the vehicles moving and the sky full of pondering lights. Having AR attached to this poster would make me more excited to attend their festival, it would also make me happier to spend money on this company because they’ve spent more time and planning on just the poster so surely, they’d do the same, if not more, on the actual festival.
Another good example of a festival poster that caught my eye is the Dreamnation poster. As soon as I saw this poster, I imagined the objects orbiting the head and the vinyl’s moving up and down the pole. There is so much life to this poster that I desperately feel the need to attend this festival if I could make this poster move through my phone camera. Knowing a poster has AR attached to it also adds mystery for a viewer because what will it do? This question increases curiosity and engagement.
I’ve taken the Dreamnation poster and sketched my own visual for an AR version of their poster. This sketch shows what I imagined when I first saw this image. Having this visual is helpful towards the final production piece because it increases the creative influences in my mind.
As well as researching similar topics and immersive design techniques, I needed to think deeper into the design aspect of the production piece. The colours I will use, any typography and any other software that may be introduced. The two festival examples above, both have unique colour palettes, but their colours used all combine to create a great design. Most festival posters have a range of bright colour tones, this is something that is enticing for their audience. Posters for these types of events need to speak out to people, attract passers by when hung up on a well-known street, because it tells the viewer about how fun this event will be just by the chosen colours used.
I am extremely influenced by the design of the Dreamnation poster and would like to use a similar retro colour palette for my design. I aim for the AR animation to use the same colour palette as the 2D design so I need to play around with colours that will look good in both 2D and 3D, the colours may differ in 3D because of the lighting, shading and movement of the animation.
Rejected Idea
To begin with, I had an idea to create an app that projects tattoos onto a person’s skin, like the social media filters, allowing the user to find their desired placement before committing to the permanent ink. The plan was to have the target audience but tattoo artists and their clients, I thought it was a great way to increase the correct communication between the artist and their clients because it’s a better way to figure out tattoo placements. I decided to reject this idea because it became too complex to create, I would have had to design a whole app then create the AR filters for within the app.
Project Planning
From here the plan is to experiment further with Zapworks, Unity and Maya, creating 3D animations for the AR aspect of the poster. I plan to use the known festival examples and create some AR animations for them but for the final production piece, I aim to design my own poster for a fake festival. I will then develop a 3D animation for this poster which will be triggered when a camera is pointing directly at the poster. Like the Zapworks blogpost, I will project my poster design through a separate device and record the AR using my own device.
This is a rough plan of how I will complete the final production piece by the following due date. Creating a plan like this helps me carefully figure out what tasks need to be done and gives me a more accurate time scale to do them.
I will begin my project plan by creating an AR for the Parklife and Dreamnation posters, their posters have really spoken to me, and I would love to recreate them in a 3D manner. Doing this also increases my skills and technique knowledge for when I create an AR for my own poster design. I will be using techniques I have been taught over the last two years on this course to develop this poster, I plan to use Adobe Illustrator to develop the poster design and will use either Maya or Adobe Aero to create the AR aspect of the poster.
During and after doing this, I will be designing my own poster, developing the visual graphics, colour palette and typography. This will be a poster to a made-up festival, so the aim is to make this poster as busy as possible, like the two examples.
I plan to ask some classmates and friends to test out the AR for the Parklife and Dreamnation posters to see how and if it works, this is also the perfect opportunity to gain any feedback from my peers. This feedback can then be used to improve my techniques before beginning the development of my own AR poster.
I created this rough sketch of how the final production piece will work, the AR will be triggered through the phone camera. On the 2D poster it just shows a flat flower and some music symbols but through the phone you will see a 3D flower with smaller flowers growing around the centre one, the music symbols will start to sway around the phone screen. This design doesn’t reflect what the final production piece will look like, this is just a rough example of how mine may work. The animation for my AR poster aims to last 15-20 seconds and will loop until the camera is no longer pointing at the poster, just like the Aria example video I took.
References
“Augmented Reality Posters.” Space Store, www.spacestore.co/product/augmented-reality-posters/. Accessed 26 Nov. 2023.
FG Trade. “IStock – 20 Year Old Female,” IStock, www.istockphoto.com/photos/20-year-old-female. Accessed 27 Nov. 2023.
“IStock – 20 Year Old Male.” IStock, www.istockphoto.com/photos/20-year-old-man. Accessed 27 Nov. 2023.
Le, James. How Computer Vision Recognizes Your Face, 29 Jan. 2018, data-notes.co/snapchats-filters-how-computer-vision-recognizes-your-face-9907d6904b91. Accessed 26 Nov. 2023.
—. “Snapchat’s Filters: How Computer Vision Recognizes Your Face.” Medium, 22 July 2018, data-notes.co/snapchats-filters-how-computer-vision-recognizes-your-face-9907d6904b91. Accessed 26 Nov. 2023.
“Parklife Festival.” Visit Manchester, www.visitmanchester.com/whats-on/parklife-festival-p329391. Accessed 26 Nov. 2023.
“The ARIA Network – Welcome to the World of ARIA.” The ARIA Network, thearianetwork.com/. Accessed 26 Nov. 2023.
“Top Ten French Festival Posters.” Design Boom, www.designboom.com/art/topaff-top-10-french-festival-posters-02-10-2021/. Accessed 26 Nov. 2023.
“Virtual Try-On.” Divante, www.divante.com/blog/examples-of-ar-powered-virtual-try-ons-in-the-fashion-industry. Accessed 26 Nov. 2023.