AR Storytelling Tool
Location Based AR
2025
During a project on the island of Naxos, Greece, I encountered a key challenge: the lack of a clear link between AR storytelling developers and cultural institutions.
This sparked the idea to create a tool that bridges this gap—a flexible AR storytelling system tailored to museum needs.
To test and refine the concept, I collaborated with the Humboldt Forum in Berlin, exploring how AR can support reconstruction and contextualisation of exhibits.
Through literature research and hands-on testing, I identified the need for accessibility, user-friendly workflows, and storytelling flexibility in museum AR tools.
The result is a prototype SDK built on Unity and Vuforia, offering museums a new way to engage visitors through inclusive and immersive digital narratives.
Role & Tasks
I was responsible for concept development, UX/UI design, software prototyping, museum collaboration and communication, user testing, and academic research.
I led the entire design and production process from initial idea and tool development, to testing in real environments, and refining based on expert and developer feedback.
My work spanned research, technical development, and cross-disciplinary communication between museums, developers, and users.
During a Project in Naxos, Greece, I faced the problem of a missing link between
augmented reality (AR) story developers and clients. I started to investigate and created the first idea of an AR Storytelling Tool, that would serve as this link. To research what parts and aspects such a tool would need I aimed for a collaboration with a museum to find out in practice. I found a partnership in the Humboldt Forum at Berlin. Throughout my research I discovered that AR is a effective technology for a variety of aspects in Museums and cultural sides. The aspects of reconstruction and contextualisation of artifacts and historical sides stood out to me. The problem of a missing tool was also mentioned in scientific papers (Boboc et al. 2022; Yilmaz und Goktas 2017) and I investigated in potential solutions to build my own. I found that Unity and Vuforia offer a flexible base for a tool, well suited for the museum use case. Regarding the storytelling aspect I discovered that AR in combination with storytelling creates an entertaining and engaging learning process, that could support Museums. Finaly, I researched further to the Humboldt Forum and their needs and this led me to the inclusivity aspect. The literature suggested to offer plenty of settings to adjust the tool, to the requirements of the user. Based on my research, I’ve created a concept, that incorporates all my findings. The tool should be a flexible unity software development kit (SDK)/add-on that works with Vuforia, to expand traditional museum exhibits with AR. It should use a minimal, high contrast user-interface (UI), with a variety of accessibility settings and presets, to create an optimal experience for everyone. The creation process is supported by Unity’s timeline and custom building blocks, to create an easy to use story creation workflow, that doesn’t require AR expert knowledge to start with. Together with a Community library, the tool can grow with future features, to support a variety of use cases in the long run. I’ve created a first prototype for the “Mathildenhöhe” in Darmstadt, to test the concept and refined it further with the Humboldt Forum. Over remote discussions and three tripto the Museum, I discover more about the museum needs and the implementation of the tool. I tried to apply my tool in praxis with an AR expansion of the “Schlosskeller”, inside the Humboldt Forum. A defect in the ventilation system leads to the closing of the exhibit and a required rearrangement of the production. In conjunction with additional production holds, due to the Museum workflow, I end up creating most of my material personally and setup an additional User testing. This Testing at Darmstadt University of Applied sciences allows me to test the development side of the tool and I show a new demo as well. Finally, I return to the Humboldt Forum for a final demonstration, to learn
more about the Museum expert perspective, but new misunderstandings lead to a small-scale test with the curators and therefore only to an indication of the museum perspective.
Over the course of the production, I’ve created one prototype for the tool and three demonstrations of the tool in practice. The developer testing demonstrated an overall positive perception to the tool and a successful creation of the story by seven developers. All of them were able to learn the tool and build their personal stories within less than one hour. The showcase demonstration at h_da was also widely positively reviewed and testers saw a lot of potential in the museum use case. Lastly the museum experts showed a lot of interest about the tool and when presenting, they were inspired to come up with other usages inside the museum. The final questionnaire indicated that the reconstruction and contextualisation aspects worked well and that the curators see potential in their application across the museum. Overall I was able to successfully create a first minimum-viable-product (MVP) of the AR storytelling tool with the core features. The development side worked and I found additional ways to improve the usability for a wider range of user. The Practical application of the tool on the other hand failed, due to the real-world conditions inside the Museum. Future work is needed, that could focus on the necessary structural needs to apply such a tool, in practice, inside a museum.