City Of Firsts Tour - AR App [CityVerve]
ROLE: Creative Producer & Director, Harvard
CLIENT: Cisco, MSP, MCC; CityVerve
A WALKING TOUR THROUGH MANCHESTER’S PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE
We partnered with one of the CityVerve SME partners, Sparta Digital, to create a first-of-its-kind augmented reality walking tour of Manchester’s innovation district.
The tour included 15 points of interest along the Oxford Road Corridor, highlighting the many firsts Manchester has produced.
Stops on the tour included use cases from the CityVerve project like the first connected building alongside revolutionary moments in history, such as the invention of the first stored-program computer and the founding of the Suffragettes movement. Each one was brought to life by augmented reality local tour guides.
The points of interest were marked around the city by installed colourful bespoke plaques inspired by the iconic blue plaques of the UK. In keeping with the theme of firsts, I went to a friend at Pentatonic with an idea around how we could produce the plaques in a way that had never been done before and they helped bring the concept to life! Using their state of the art technology we created the plaques out of up-cycled CDs and DVDs, reflecting Manchester’s rich history in music and media, and up-cycled sneakers to reflect the Ramblers movement of 1932 and the ‘Right to Roam’ supporting a circular economy and low carbon footprint for the campaign along with contributing to the long list of “firsts” for the city. We created stand alone plaques for firsts that did not yet have their own city issues blue plaques, and ones that retro-fitted around existing blue plaques.
