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Project Overview

See art all around you by holding up your phone. Overlaid on the real world you'll see photos of the artworks with information about them and comments that others have added. streetARt will help you find all kinds of hidden creative treasures.

Developed by MOB, a Sydney based R&D lab utilising their own platforms and integration of the Layar Player SDK to help showcase the utility mobile locative Augmented Reality can provide. Street art and AR seemed like the perfect fit.

Organisation

MOB

Team

MOB

Project Brief

streetARtAPP can open your eyes to the public art, graffiti, tags & sculpture all around you, - no matter where you happen to find yourself.

streetARtAPP is an Augmented Reality iPhone app that uses a combination of Flickr photos and images uploaded via the app by streetARt members to show you the street art around you.

We’re really outsiders that just enjoy the art and really wanted an easier way to find it ourselves. The artists that have used it have given us really positive feedback and seem happy to spread the love.

Also available for Android and iPhone on the Layar AR browser, but image upload of artwork not supported in this context.

Project Innovation / Need

We were one of the first people to use the Layar SDK (Layar Player) and the streetARtAPP was released to co-incide with the Layar Player launch.

We created an app framework around the SDK that integrates with our buildAR platform (http://buildAR.com - the world's first Augmented Reality content management system) and our smartMOB multi-device development platform.

We added over 40,000 CC geo-located images of streetart from Flickr from over 500 cities globally to ensure that from app release there was content on the application that people could discover around them where ever they were.

It is the only street art focused AR experience to date.

User Experience

streetARtAPP has a number of contexts. We use device detection to identify the type of device accessing the app content so only the features and functionality available for their device is displayed.

- Desktop site (http://streetArtapp.com) which is primarily a promotional site, but also displays streetArt content if a shared piece of artwork is accessed by a person on their desktop (rather than mobile). This mode supports people viewing, commenting on and sharing content.

- Mobile site (various device class groups) - to display artwork when accessed via the streetARt layer in the Layar AR browser or artwork shared via twitter and accessed via mobile. This mode supports people viewing & finding via an Augmented Reality view, map view or list view, commenting on and sharing content.

- iPhone App (optimised the user interface for standard and retina display). This mode supports people viewing & finding via an Augmented Reality view, map view or list view, commenting on and sharing content. People can also upload new streetARt via the app. Once the photo of the artwork and associated information (e.g. artist name) has been added, the photo becomes a visual marker overlaid on the real world for the location of the artwork.

People can use the app in anonymous mode but if they want to share or add artwork then they need to authenticate via Twitter.

Project Marketing

Since launch we’ve done very little active promotion ourselves except for Twitter and a blog post. The main drivers that have led to awareness and uptake have been being promoted as a Featured Layer by Layar (http://bit.ly/hQz63m) and also used as 1 of 4 case studies in the Layar showcase.

In the first month we attracted over 25,000 unique users from 166 countries. Our total count is now >200,000 unique users from over 194 countries, with a high percentage of users returning on a weekly basis(and a core deidicated set almost daily).

New users are finding the app primarily through Layar where it is consistently within the top 3 most popular worldwide as well as people sharing the artwork they find/add via Twitter.

We now have artists and streetARtAPP members who are pushing us to expand the features to include spotlights on locations and artists which we are in the process of doing. We're also developing an importer feature to enable people to directly import their sets of street art photos direct from Flickr.