An Investigation of the Use of Augmented Reality in Public Art

Augmented reality offers many artistic possibilities when it comes to the creation of place-based public artworks. In this paper, we present a series of works around the topic of augmented reality (AR) art and place-based storytelling, including the use of walking as a creative method, a series of workshops with emerging artists, public AR art collaborations and a study to examine user experience when interacting with such artworks. Our findings from these works show the potential of integrating augmented reality with public physical artworks and offer guidance to artists and AR developers on how to expand this potential. For artists, we show the importance of the space in which the artwork will be placed and provide guidance on how to work with the space. For developers, we find that there is a need to create tools that work with artists’ existing practices and to investigate how to expand augmented reality past the limitations of site- or piece-specific apps.