The White House Historical Association is a private, nonprofit, educational organization with a mission to enhance the understanding and appreciation of the Executive Mansion. First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy founded the Association in 1961 to help the White House collect and exhibit the very best artifacts of American history and culture. Today, our acquisition, preservation, research, and education efforts continue through generous private donations and the sale of our books, products, and the Official White House Ornament.
WHHA reached out to us, Janelle Birchfield and myself, to create an augmented reality experience to be experienced by people near by Lafayette Square during the cherry blossom festival. There was also a second AR experience from WHHA that was triggered by QR codes from "baseball cards" of various presidents.
Research necessary images of Suffragettes, Theodore Roosevelt, as well as images of US presidents playing golf. Clean select images to be used in the AR expereiences. Create AR experiences of the Sufferageettes and Theodore Roosevelt that is presented to users located near the White House. As well as, create AR experiences of US Presidents playing golf.
1 AR cutout of a painting of the White House, Suffragettes, and 2 of President Theodore Roosevelt 1 AR cutout of John F. Kennedy; 1 AR cutout of Donald J. Trump; 1 AR cutout of Woodrow Wilson; and 1 AR cutout of Dwight D Eisenhower. All of which were available to viewers via URL so that they didn't have to download an app in order to experience.
During this project, before getting started on development, we needed to identify the imagery we wanted to use in our AR experiences. I worked closely with the project manager in order to ensure that the client would be aligned with the imagery we ended up going with.
In order to associate the images we selected to the 3D, AR experience, we first needed to ensure that the subjects in the images were removed from the background. That way when we project the images onto a 3D surface there isn't any unwanted artifacts or background shown.
The initial deliverables were all provided by way of using model-viewer and was delivered as live links from Glitch. I ensured that the urls were custom named to what was being presented as well as adding <title> <meta> tags as well as the appropriate favicon for WHHA.
For the second deliverables, Janelle designed the "baseball cards" that she got printed and mailed to WHHA as part of a gift bag to various donors for an event. Sind the delivery wasn't going to be based on geolocation, we needed to come up with a solution that worked for this deliverable. The idea was to have these baseball cards have QR codes on the back in order for the recipients to take out their phone and be presented with a 8th Wall link that then delivers the recipients an AR experience that features the cutout of the president of each corresponding card with the added feature to take a photo of the president cut out.
Since I never received copies of the baseball cards, I created 3D representations of them below.
View all: Hover + left mouse button
Rotate: Click and drag away from the cards
Zoom: two-finger pinch or mouse wheel
Pan: two-finger swipe up/down left/right on trackpad
The results of both deliverables were a success. Even prior to the launch of both deliverables, the internal audience at WHHA loved the end results. After the launch of the first deliverable, the campaign successfully expanded WHHA's reach to users that were geolocated around DC during the time frame the campaign was live. The baseball cards were given to the donors that were at the yacht club golf function and were well received.
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