Scavengar × Google ARCore Geospatial API

#MakeUsVisible 2.0

Discover women pioneers through art-led AR monuments powered by Google's ARCore Geospatial API

At Scavengar, it is our mission to breathe life into urban environments, fill them with hidden stories and meaningful interactions which are rooted in our physical surroundings. Today, we’d like to take you with us behind-the-scenes, give you more context on our latest purpose project, and share with you our most recent collaboration.

We teamed up with Google’s ARCore team to integrate the Geospatial API into Scavengar, enabling a deeper connection between the physical and the virtual.
In this blog post, we'll delve deeper into the storyline, how the project came to be, what makes it unique and how it differentiates from WebAR. Read on to learn about how this campaign inspires, entertains, and educates by showcasing the stories of women pioneers who have made significant impacts on society.

About #MakeUsVisible 2.0

The project is designed to bring attention to the often overlooked stories of women pioneers in various fields of culture and science. By combining digital art with an immersive storytelling layer we've created multi-sensory, art-led AR monuments that blend seamlessly with real-world surroundings. These monuments can be enabled at physical locations throughout metropolitan environments in Germany, allowing users to explore the lives and legacies of these female protagonists in a truly engaging way and shine some light on often overseen important female personas in history.

The first chapter, which is located in Frankfurt, is created in tandem with ARora, the medienkunst e.V., and is being supported by the Aventis foundation. Together with the great curator Anne Wichmann and the magnificent artists Dagmar Schürer and Mohsen Hazrati, we chose to tell the stories of Lise Meitner and Maria Sibylla Merian at the Goethe and Gutenberg monuments in the city center. Meitner discovered nuclear fission, yet despite being one of Germany’s biggest female scientists with over 40 nominations for the Nobel Prize, she was never awarded for it, living in the shadow of Otto Hahn. Merian, on the other hand, was a Frankfurt-born naturalist and one of the first-ever entomologists studying the topic of metamorphosis. She was constantly oscillating between art and science and was referenced by Goethe.

Technical Integration: Google's ARCore Geospatial API

The experiences leverage the ARCore Geospatial API for precise localization of the digital content and the user’s exact position. There's a strong correlation between the rooting of a virtual experience in the physical surroundings and the perceived level of immersion. Thus, it is crucial to create contextual relevance with a variety of methods if you want to make people forget they are still holding a phone in their hands. This is impossible to do with only GPS, as its level of accuracy can deviate up to 50m, making the Geospatial API a crucial component in AR storytelling with Scavengar. Specifically, the wide coverage in over 100 countries, which doesn't require users to map the environment first, gives the Geospatial API a competitive advantage over other offerings and allows us to create location-based AR at global scale.

In addition to the localization, the ARCore Streetscape Geometry API helps to close the gap between the virtual and the physical. Being able to anchor content on buildings, and increasing realism with building occlusion, adds a convincing level of authenticity to the experiences and is further amplified, when combined with physical simulations. In our case, users can spawn larger-than-life atoms which bounce off the Frankfurt skyline, adding a playful element to the educative narrative.

Multi-sensory Storytelling

The #MakeUsVisible 2.0 campaign takes advantage of multi-sensory features to create a truly immersive experience. In addition to the visually stunning digital art, the AR monuments incorporate audio elements, such as voiceovers and spatial audio soundscapes, which provide a rich auditory backdrop to the stories. Users can also interact with the monuments through touch, with haptic feedback providing a tactile dimension to the experience. This combination of visual, auditory, and tactile elements creates an unparalleled level of immersion, bringing the stories of these women pioneers to life.

Accessibility

One of Scavengar's key differentiators is the app-less accessibility of the AR experiences. While traditional WebAR solutions require users to access AR content through a mobile browser, significantly reducing visual fidelity, tracking stability and overall AR performance, our platform leverages native app frameworks. This means users don't need to download an app or go through their mobile browser, resulting in native app performance minus the app download.
Users can enjoy a more engaging and seamless experience that is on par with a native AR app without sacrificing accessibility.

What's next?

The first chapter of #Make Us Visible 2.0 is being rolled out this summer, with more cities across Germany in production.
If you'd like to learn more or bring the concept to your city, feel free to get in touch!

Ready to make the world your canvas?

Written by:
  • Marc Wicht Marc Wicht
  • Arthur Schiller Arthur Schiller
  • Henriette Gressler Henriette Gressler