LUMEN — mixed reality / projection mapping / museums
Lumen is a mixed reality projection device that immerses people in alternate or heightened realities in their physical environment.
This project is an ongoing collaboration between our four person collective, Senseless World, and Museo Marino Marini in Florence, Italy.
Lumen takes the form of a flashlight that can create a virtual map of a given space and use this map to overlay virtual experiences onto the physical environment through projection.
As a person moves around with Lumen, it tracks where they are in the virtual world and projects it into the physical world, akin to a flashlight revealing things in the dark. Lumen frees augmented reality from the confines of screens and enables many people to experience it together.
Our colleague Arvind Sanjeev won the Playable Museum Award in 2019 and brought us together to grow Lumen into a versatile platform that can enable a variety of mixed reality experiences in museum spaces.
Museo Marino Marini is the first museum to invite us into their space to create an experience with them.
The evocative work of the Italian sculptor, Marino Marini, is spread throughout the four floors of the museum. The architecture and the sculptures seem as if they were made for each other.
People Centered Research and Stakeholder Interviews
Our team visited Florence to familiarize ourselves with the art and architecture of this museum and to learn more about its history.
We conducted people centered research — interviewed art historians and curators to understand the significance of Marini’s art as well as the history of the building. We learned about their goals as an institution and some of the challenges they face.
To understand how visitors interact with the art, we took their museum tours ourselves and observed other specialty tours that were created for kids.
Our learnings from these activities inspired us to quickly start testing out some sacrificial ideas and experiences.
Insights & Ideation
We synthesized our findings into insights and developed some core design principles to guide our concepts.
We aimed to create concepts that honored the artist’s intention and leveraged the curatorial staff’s existing educational tour formats. Our goal was to create an experience that draws attention to the art and doesn’t distract from it.
We found that mixed reality can be a great tool for bringing to light some of the more overlooked aspects of the artwork.
Experience Prototyping
We created experience prototypes based on the four initial concepts we landed on. We treated these as co-creation sessions to bring museum visitors as well as in-house experts into our process.
Our learnings from these sessions have led us to the final experience we’re currently developing. A storytelling experience that uses Lumen to reveal hidden paths that weave throughout the museum, leading to magical and educational interactions with various sculptures. An experience that augments physical space and acts as a digital connective tissue between the artwork and the architecture it lives in.
Tech Development
We’re currently developing the technology to bring this experience to reality.
