Museum of Sex AR Retail Experience
How can one create a system for museums, that engages a city-wide audience while providing an interactive retail experience? In this project, my team and I aim to use Augmented Reality to not only enrich the experience of shopping in the store, but also create an immersive entry point to MoSEX itself. We designed the system to raise interest in the exhibitions and convert more shoppers into museum visitors, and thus seamlessly connect the retail and museum going experiences.
This is a project done in the class Interactive Design for Museums with professor Anthony Deen. This project is done in collaboration with Taylor Rodriguez, Misung Kim, Ray Hung, Jed Segovia and Katerina Verda.
When the Museum of Sex was first established in 2002, it was without precedent in the museum world. It has since then generated over 30 exhibitions. The Museum currently hosts six informational exhibits and interactive installations. With a grand permanent collection of over 20,000 artifacts, the Museum is a rich educational experience that one might miss out on simply because the subject can seem a little taboo.
The Museum aims to "bring the best of current scholarship on sex and sexuality to the widest possible audiences", and our team designed a system to help achieve that goal.
Our approach to the project is to explore how can we better connect the retail front of the museum with the core content. Situated at the cross of Fifth Ave and 27th street, the Museum receives great exposure from its off-the-street museum store. The well-designed environment provides for a unique and pleasurable shopping experience.
Using the museum store as an opportunity to redesign the dynamic between the retail and exhibition experiences, we begin identifying audience interaction points (as shown on right), and establish the goal to convert the audiences from top level down.
Why AR?
Inclusive
As an advertising tool, Augmented Reality has a very large potential audience. It it easy to use, and therefor engages not only millennials but people of a wide age range.
Innovative
Augmented Reality is a rather unconventional technology to be implemented in museums, which is appropriate to the character of MoSex.
Inexpensive
As opposed to traditional print advertising and interactive screen displays, AR technology has a significantly lower cost. It will be available to all smartphone users.
AR Triggers
Taken inspiration from the museum logo, we extracted the "X" and used repetition to establish an AR Trigger image that is a fit to the culture of the museum. The AR trigger will be applied across multiple mediums: tickets, store receipts, complimentary laptop stickers, outdoor billboards and posters.
Mockup
Call to download the app will be displayed on museum advertising campaigns. As potential museum visitors arrive in the store, there will be demo devices displaying the AR app and instructions to download, helping people effortlessly onboard the digital experience if they have not yet used the app. As they discover exhibition information from scanning products in store, we aim to generate interest for museum visits.
AR App Prototype
The AR application serves as an interactive tool and entry point to basic information about the museum and on-going exhibitions. As the users scan a MoSEX trigger or a product, they will receive related information about either a current exhibition, a fun fact, or a product for purchase. The results will be curated so the same trigger will not consecutively generate the same content. If the user wishes to learn more about their generated content, the app will present more information, and prompt the user to visit with various coupons.
Visit this link for a live interactive prototype.