The Gowanus Augmented Reality Walking Tour is a smart phone app that I have designed and built with Lucas Wozniak. The Tour offers a sensory-rich interactive mixed reality experience through the camera view of smart devices.  Visitors are introduced to the history and contested development of the Gowanus Canal neighborhood.  Many visible traces of this history remain, but things are changing fast in this rapidly transforming neighborhood.  Taking the physical artifacts one encounters along the Canal as points of departure, the Tour elaborates freely on the visible evidence with animation, text, audio and haptics, zooming into microcosmic processes of transformation or zooming out to broader critical narratives.  The result is a hybrid virtual-physical form of situated storytelling that invites the visitor to make connections between the past, the present and where things are or could be going.

THE GOWANUS AUGMENTED REALITY TOUR APP TEAM
Sarah Drury, Concept, Design and Project Director
Lucas Wozniak, XR Designer and Programmer
Guy Barash, Composer and Sound Design
Alma Hutter, Research and Administration
The Gowanus Augmented Reality Walking Tour has been funded in part by the Puffin Foundation, the Brooklyn Arts Fund and Temple University.

For project updates:
https://www.instagram.com/gowanusar