Flypad: Designing Trajectories in a Large-Scale Permanent Augmented Reality Installation

A long-term naturalistic study reveals how artists designed, visitors experienced, and curators and technicians maintained a public interactive artwork over a four year period. The work consisted of a collaborative augmented reality game that ran across eleven networked displays (screens and footpads) that were deployed along a winding ramp in a purpose-built gallery. Reflections on design meetings and documentation show how the artists responded to this architectural setting and addressed issues of personalisation, visitor flow, attracting spectators, linking real and virtual, and accessibility. Observations of visitors reveal that while their interactions broadly followed the artists’ design, there was far more flexible engagement than originally anticipated, especially within visiting groups, while interviews with curators and technicians reveal how the work was subsequently maintained and ultimately reconfigured. Our findings extend discussions of ‘interactional trajectories’ within CSCW, affirming the relevance of this concept to describing collaboration in cultural settings, but also suggesting how it needs to be extended to better reflect group interactions at multiple levels of scale.