2260 Augmented Reality with Print Experiences
By: Camille Stephens
Tags: Stress Management, Zapworks, Coping Strategies, Mental Health, Augmented Reality

Bringing the Printed Page to Life

Introduction

For the AR and Print project, we were tasked with creating a tri-fold print pamphlet and including several augmented reality experiences that would enhance the printed pamphlet for a reader, such as a video, external link, audio, slideshow, or other piece of media.

Why I Chose My Topic

I ended up choosing to do my pamphlet on stress and coping mechanisms for dealing with stressors on a day-to-day basis, in the long-term, and in urgent situations. I chose this topic for a very personal reason, in that I struggle a lot to deal with stress in healthy ways and to cope rather than let it build up until I can’t ignore it any more. Finding ways to handle and cope with stressors and urgent situations was something I had a vested interest in, and my research allowed me to add coping mechanisms to my own repertoire and to be better equipped to handle stress now as it comes up.

Initial Concepts and Ideas

Some of my initial thoughts were to have some things related to grounding techniques or meditation and potentially to discuss and explain the sympathetic nervous system. As I started looking for grounding technique media that I could include as an AR experience, I realized that there were a lot of coping strategies that I could talk about, which ended up putting me more on the path of dealing with stress and getting yourself out of a bad headspace.

Initial AR Experience Ideas

This shift into making the pamphlet centered around dealing with being in a stressful situation lead to me thinking more about adding things like guided breathing or meditation, a list of mantra suggestions for meditation, and a site that I’d found a few years back that was all about using art as a creative outlet and using the medium to help yourself when you are in a difficult headspace. I had considered other videos, but I thought that a simple breathing guide would be the best use of the video functionality because it allows you to focus on nothing but the breathing guide, which functions without you having to listen to anything, which can be very helpful if you are overwhelmed or panicking and everything is suddenly much more difficult.

The Creation Process

For this project, I first had to create the widgets and Zapcodes for each AR experience I wanted to include. A Zapcode is a specific kind of scannable image like a QR code that looks something like this:

The code is scanned with the Zapworks app, which will then take you to the linked media that is connected to the Zapcode in the printed material. In the Zapworks widgets, you have the option to create many different kinds of experiences, such as an image, album, video, audio, contact, calendar event, or external link. I chose to use a calendar event, an external link, a video, and an image for my four Zapworks experiences that I would include in my AR Print Pamphlet.

When I was starting the project, I made a style guide to adhere to while I made my pamphlet.

I selected an image as shown here to base my color palette off of, and then selected colors from the image. I also selected fonts and weights to suit the design that I wanted to go for in this project.

The Zapworks site allows you to customize the color of your Zapcodes, so I chose to make my Zapcodes the highlight color in my palette so they would stand out easily in the middle of the text I had in the pamphlet.

Zapworks also allows you to add in a custom sound to play in the app when the Zapcode is selected and enabled. I chose to add in a custom sound, and simply selected a calm, relaxed piano line that would hopefully cultivate the same calming feeling that I was going for with the rest of the experience of the pamphlet.

These are the four AR experiences I created and embedded into my printed pamphlet. I wanted to include a long-term coping strategy such as finding a creative outlet; an urgent situation strategy such as grounding; a day-to-day strategy such as breathing exercises, and a link to more information in the Wikipedia Page for World Mental Health Day, as well as the option to add it to your calendar.