In 2016 I was grateful for the opportunity to hang some pieces in one of my favourite galleries in Australia, Altenburg & Co coincidently located in a town I often call home: Braidwood.
My aim for the show was to engage with my potential new audience, get some feedback at targeted events, and to test technology requirements and feasibility of interactive entertainment and illustration reaching mass adoption in locations compromised by poor connectivity.
For this show, a group show with Melanie Cansell and Steve Maher, I managed to showhow:
Finish 120 pieces, frame and hung them in 30 days.
Encode 40 pieces with interactive features
Publish 12 augmented reality experiences.
Braidwood experiences were hugely impacted by lack of network connectivity and mobile data limitations.
Telstra customers experienced lag and latency at 3 times that reported by Optus customers.
I then tested the same pieces elsewhere, my favourite finding:
Canberra audiences embraced the technology with 6.3 scans per unique user compared to 1.7 in Braidwood.
Canberra audiences spent on average 2 minutes per experience compared to Braidwood average 7 minutes per experience.
Canberra audiences engaged* at more than 400% more per scan than audiences in Braidwood.
*I'm funny about engagement measurement and determine engagement success equal to the commercial metric it is measured against. In this instance I wanted to understand how a scan converted to commission revenues, which is a tough and specific metric. I do measure impressions, interactions, click through, touch points and other standard benchmarks but rarely find this kind of data useful.
The show was opened by Cindy Pastel, the original Drag Muse and inspiration for 'Priscilla Queen of the Desert', a short video (above) was made again using some new AI tech tricks and hacks I wanted to test, no editor, no post, not perfect, but better than the test before. II did publish an augmented reality experience using LAYAR that was live until July 2017. I loved LAYAR as an augmented reality platform, but they have been acquired by BlippAR. So far I'm not enjoying any platform as much as LAYAR. If I republish somewhere I'll update this page!
