Human Ventures regularly works with communities and organisations to capture and create digital stories (generally short films) that address or highlight a particular issue or social need. For example, we are currently working in Bundaberg with the local community to produce stories that explore disaster recovery, resilience and disaster preparedness. Another example is us working with a group of young people in Brisbane who are the primary carers for their parents - we work with these people to tell their stories in order to raise awareness and help young carers engage with the world around them.
Historically, these digital story projects have been released as a DVD and series of web videos, however lately we have been creating interactive maps with these videos (and other information) embedded on specific locations. We have also been 'embedding' the stories (particularly the projects that work in a whole community) into the physical locations where they belong. We've been using QR codes for this, but this is clunky tech and we would like to move this to an augmented reality context.
The benefit for the communities/people we work with include:
The kinds of content we would primarily be keen to display includes:
I think the minimum viable product would be a platform that allows us to easily embed the above content into an interactive map while at the same time, 'tagging' that physical location so for instance, if someone was to hold a smart phone up to a building in Logan they would see the content overlaid.
We had a meeting with Andrew and Dan from Human Ventures on Feb 21. They showed us one of the partner they currently used ti support most of the features they are interested in. They are called Feral Arts and have created Place Stories. It is a pretty cool app that allows uploading stories and maps them. But Andrew mentioned that he was not too happy about the app not really moving forward, some features dropping and instabilities, and also the fact they they are not mobile nor do any QR/AR for local contextual content.
We discussed with them the possibility of engaging Feral Arts to re-use the existing product, but a the moment it is a but on hold, see email from Andrew:
" spoke with Feral Arts (the developers of Place Stories) and they may be open to having some external developers assist with feature implementation, however they are currently working towards a funding deadline.
They should be more available to consider this in 2 weeks.
In the meantime, I'll have a think about alternative projects."
We looked at PlaceStories and created a test project with stories on their website, embedded below. We have discussed the idea of having a mobile website that would: