Mixed-reality Interactive Journey Design for Technology Theme Exhibition

Accenture Liquid Studio (LS) as a technological innovation consultant company presents their technical capabilities by demo showcases for promoting business opportunities. Demo Theme Park is the collection of all their demo showcases. It locates in LS Utrecht office as a company in-house technical exhibition. A mobile app, Liquid Studio Passport is proposed throughout this project for enhancing the Them Park exhibition on visitor experience by augmented reality technology. The passport visit plan conducts a holistic experience for visitors that it facilitates preparation before arriving, enriches interactions along visiting, and values takeaways to promote further communications between visitor and Liquid Studio by the ending. The project is initiated as: Creating interactive smart visit experience for inspiring studio visitors among multiple technology showcases around Demo Theme Park in order to promote new business possibilities. Analysis To build a tangible basis for further design processes, a research phase was initiated for gathering valuable insights around the Theme Park exhibition visiting context. It includes analysis on both internal and external perspectives for conducting design challenge statements with its context scope. Conceptualization Base on insights from analysis phase, a design goal is proposed as “Design an explorative, collaborative, and discoverable mixed-reality journey for Liquid Studio in-house visitors to enhance the sense of consistency during visiting tech demo exhibition”. Ideation, Conceptualization and Design activities were conducted accordingly. The ideation was also considered as a reflection for better preparation on later processes where the scope of the design was setted as to design a overall journey experience. A number of sub-concepts were generated which was then modularized into functional features and consisted into a 9 step journey flow. The flow was then used for validate whether the modules are useful along the journey or whether any part is missing. Storyboard was made for concept evaluation sessions for participants to walk through the journey along the storytelling. The sessions were executed for insight gathering that finally to conduct a journey solution that fulfils the design goal. Final Design According to the finding from analysis and conceptualization, the final design was conveyed with a concept overview, a journey flow and a journey map. To validate whether the design could match with the design gaol, two prototypes were made for user/visitor tests separately for the journey carrier, which is an AR (augmented reality) mobile application, and the using scenario as the participants are not able to visit the exhibition on-site under the corona situation. The final evaluation was addressed, and as a result, the design fulfilled the properties as desired quite well in general. As the project is part of the long-term development of the demo Theme Park for Accenture Liquid Studio, recommendations were made for later developments. As currently it is processed and proposed theoretically, it will need more insights from in field context researches.