The project evolved greatly. We started our concept from a drawing of people waving to others who were on a boat. The first idea was centered on waving from a boat and how it’s an essential part of the dynamics of a city such as Venice; we wanted to exploit this as a motivation for strangers to meet. The idea was not developed a lot and it was later abandoned; however, we kept the idea of people meeting through staged encounters. We started to think of a way for users to find each other with interests relative to theirs but we eventually had trouble finding a good way to conclude the experience.
We kept the goal of meeting people but shifted the aim: developing he project into an application in which users could discover things about the city that are usually not easily found. This concept remained throughout the project. It was also in this phase that the possibility of using augmented reality came into consideration.
In this phase of the project we divided our users in two: locals (residents) and visitors. The application would allow visitors to discover unusual things in the city with the help of locals. Eventually we discarded this idea and focused on producing an application that allowed users to share a common goal. We set the aim to an application that allows users to stumble upon unusual things and places.
After discussing the project we felt it was somewhat boring and the augmented reality part was becoming a big part of it when it should be just a complement. After several discussions we started to develop the fairy-tale metaphor that would eventually be simplified just to the rabbit-hole metaphor, which we liked.
Users would follow a rabbit through paths (which we named rabbit holes), decide where to go based upon decisions generated at different turning points, and arriving at the destination would use the phone and the augmented reality to find photos, images and music left behind by other users.
In this part of the project we faced the biggest obstacle: we had developed a pixel-art graphic style that didn’t match the rest of the application. Our challenge was to make the application consistent in its function and graphic form.
The rabbit-hole idea was kept almost on its entirely but some changes were made that changed the application on a profound way. The first major change was changing the graphic style. The pixel art approach was changed to a more subtle and minimalist style. We took out the use of maps so the user could get purposely lost. The augmented reality would be used only for the final part of the experience. It was no longer the most essential part of the project.
Click here to download all graphic proposals.
Rabbit behavior
We did a small research on how rabbits communicate and act between them. The most significant discovery was the binky. The binky is when a rabbit jumps in the air and kicks its legs. It means the animal is extremely happy. Several videos of rabbits performing this action can be found on YouTube.
Homepage | Concept | Design | Process | Code | Critical reflection | Credits | Downloads |