Talking Houses - ein Augmented Reality Experience
Alte Häuser verwandeln sich in animierte Cartoon-Figuren und sprechen über sich selbst
TALKING HOUSES is the prototype of an augmented reality experience with a smartphone: in the AR app, old houses in Zurich's Niederdorf turn into animated cartoon characters that start talking about themselves in an entertaining way. The research project is a collaboration between postdocs from ETH Zurich (Kallori Saikishore, Ribin Chalumattu) and from the ZHdK the animation artist Francois Chalet, Prof. Martin Zimper (Narrative Lead) and Jonas Füllemann (Sound). Funded by the Media Technology Center of the ETH.
Augmented reality (AR) technologies can enhance the user’s experience of visiting attractions, shops, and restaurants by using AR-based virtual elements and additional information about the places they are visiting. In this work, we transform the city landscape or famous buildings into a unique experience by bringing iconic entertaining characters onto the buildings to increase the engagement of users. Our techniques transform buildings or parts of a building into a virtual cartoon character with which the user can interact. We designed two unique experiences: (a) The Square in which the character will talk about the building’s history and other anecdotes about the area, and (b) The Hunt in which the user is involved in a scavenger hunt where they have to identify buildings using the hints given by virtual characters. We have conducted a live user study to assess the usability of our prototype and our preliminary experimental results demonstrated that our prototype has high usability and users using our system felt a pleasant and enjoyable experience.
We have developed an AR mobile application called ’Talking House’ for a small part of Zurich city’s old town called Niederdorf. As a first step, we manually selected the buildings by visiting the areas in Niederdorf and researching the history of the place. For our final application, we selected 11 buildings and one monument to augment with virtual characters. Once the buildings are identified, the next step is writing engaging character dialogues using the history of the buildings and their surrounding area. These dialogues vary in content ranging from a conversation between characters and historical facts to jokes and poems. Afterwards, we recorded the dialogues with the help of two professional voice actors. We then created a visual look and animation for each character by considering the geometry of the buildings and the spoken dialogues. Our characters are designed using simple shapes like squares and circles to better blend the virtual elements with the real-world buildings. For example, the window of a building is used to create animated eyes for a character. Finally, we enhanced the dialogues by adding background music and sound effects to make the AR experience more immersive.
