In coordination with the opening of the Quincy Valley Historical Society & Museum‘s new exhibit Hope and Hard Work: The Story of Our Farms and Food, our latest app, QVHSM: farmAR was launched on Saturday, March 30 in Quincy, Washington.

According to our High School volunteer, Spri, who was on hand to help museum guests get the app installed on their phones or loan them a museum-supplied tablet, the new app was embraced with equal enthusiasm by attendees in all age groups and of all levels of experience with mobile apps.

QVHSM: farmAR features video narrations by Quincy High School students and others, and is designed in such a way that more of these narrations can be added to the app over time. We expect that high school students, classes, and clubs will work with the museum staff to continue to enhance the exhibit using the technology that we have created.

As with the apples boxes above, some of the narrations are accompanied by additional 3D items, such as an animated steer who hangs out with Ed the cattleman as he talks about French Fries, or the virtual tractor below, which sits on the lawn outside the Heritage Barn, activated by scanning a tractor silhouette.

Another component of the app, also developed to be updated over time by local students, classes, and clubs, are the annotated panoramas than can be viewed by looking around in all directions with your camera. These can either be through-the-lens panoramas that point out items in the real-time landscape from a specific point in space, or photos that have been taken for the purpose of viewing in the same way, but from anywhere. WORKSHOP 3D is working with the local drone club, who will be working with the museum staff to add panoramas of local farms, feed lots, processing facilities, etc.

This project’s goal of creating an opportunity for high school students and other community members to add content over time also pushed us further toward our goal of developing apps with replaceable content, enabling a single app to go beyond the limitations of the amount of content that can be delivered at one time in a single app toward apps that serve as more of a content “pipeline”, delivering Augmented Reality content on an on-demand basis. We took several important steps in that direction on this project.