"Tower of Faces" gallery at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC
A team made up of four ITP alumni, Emily Conrad, Aya Karpińska, Rui Pereira, and Jeremy Rotsztain, created an augmented reality project that won this year's Core 77 Design Award for Interaction, and received a Notable Mention for Emerging Technologies. Their work involves an AR experience for a gallery of photographs in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The four are working together at the experience design company that Emily Conrad co-founded, Tessellate Studio.
Tessellate created an Augmented Reality (AR) experience in the iconic Tower of Faces (TOF) gallery at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, as a celebration of life. It is a space that brings visitors face-to-face with portraits of hundreds of ordinary citizens from a small town called Eishishok, the majority of whom were murdered by Nazi German perpetrators and their local helpers. However, many visitors passed through the space without lingering, misunderstood the context, or were left wondering who the people depicted in the photographs were, and what happened to them. The Tower of Faces Augmented Reality (AR) experience was designed to achieve critical comprehension goals, support the gallery's primary message, and operate within two important constraints: 1) no signage specific to the AR experience or iPads, and 2) no Museum staff for visitor guidance, or for device management and maintenance. Finally, the experience had to grapple with sensitive subject matter within a space memorializing the lives of real people.
Click here to learn more.