AR Cité! Taking Augmented Reality to Town

Augmented Reality is poised to enter mainstream culture with a splash — and a group of Dawson students have been riding that wave with style.  Experimenting with the rapidly evolving new tech, they’re creating a lively ‘pop app’, pedagogical and entertaining at the same time, that’s inspired by the college itself and its downtown Montreal environment.

The first iteration of AR Cité — pronounced Our City — was unveiled on December 3 at Media Night, the end-of-semester showcase of new work by students in the Cinema | Communications Department. The event may have been scaled down in compliance with pandemic restrictions, but attendees were in a party mood and the project met with an enthusiastic response.

“The whole experience has been so cool!” says student Sophia Conway-Giannoplouos, who presented the project at Media Night.  “We spend so much time in this neighbourhood, without knowing its complex and multi-layered history, and this project reveals some of that history in a dynamic and completely new way.”

Imagine if our city could speak
AR Cité is the brainchild of faculty member Reisa Levine and students in her Communications Design course. Their collaborators on Phase One were Ramona Ramochland and her Media Lab, with technical and production support by KngFu Numerik, a leading Montreal producer of multiplatform content. Conceived as a user-friendly app that works on most smartphones or tablets, AR Cite will be available in both English and French as a free download by summer 2022.

Once you’ve downloaded the app, the camera on your device will be able to identify over a dozen designated landmarks, located throughout the campus and surrounding neighbourhood. AR Cité will then ‘augment’ what you see, superimposing newly created AR content, conceived and designed by Dawson students, onto the real thing.

The effect is both magical and richly informative. Point your phone at an otherwise ordinary façade on Ste Catherine Street West — and voila! you’ll be treated to a snappy visual history of the Seville, a vaudeville theatre that once occupied the spot. Pivot your camera onto the door of the Dawson library, and you’ll conjure up images of the same space when it served as the chapel for the historic Congrégation de Notre-Dame convent.

Other sites on the app include the Montreal Forum, once considered the high temple of Canada’s national sport; Westmount Square, designed by the great modernist architect Mies van der Rohe; and the monumental mural of Abenaki filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin on Lincoln Street.

“AR has the power to open windows onto forgotten or suppressed histories”
The team behind AR Cité cite the example of pioneering community-driven AR initiatives like The Monuments Project, an educational project created by the New York-based Movers and Shakers, artists and activists who use AR to retrieve the suppressed histories of Black and Brown Americans, superimposing eye-catching counter-narratives onto well-known colonial monuments like Columbus Circle.

“That’s the beauty of Augmented Reality,” says Reisa Levine, producer on AR Cité. “When employed in this way, with imagination and creativity, it has the power to open windows onto forgotten or suppressed histories — whether it’s the experience of Indigenous peoples who inhabited the area before the arrival of Europeans, or racy anecdotes about Montreal’s notorious nightlife.”

Creating content for AR poses its own unique set of challenges, says Reisa. “AR is still very new, quite distinct from film and other media, so the creative process is all about experimenting. But that’s part of the fun. We’re breaking ground with this project, and that feels exciting.”

AR: “a true Web 3.0″
“AR will probably be massive and change the web in a fundamental way,” says Lucas Matney, senior editor at techcrunch.com, “a true Web 3.0 that’s the biggest shift of the Internet to date.” Hats off to students and faculty here at Dawson who are playing a part in advancing this transformative new medium.  Phase two of production on AR Cité continues for the next two semesters and the team welcomes new members — filmmakers, writers, programmers, artists, etc — from across the Dawson community.

Contact Reisa Levine at rlevine@dawsoncollege.qc.ca for more information or if you would like to consider participating in the project.

 AR Cite receives support from Entente Quebec Canada (ECQ), a federal/provincial partnership that funds minority language educational projects in the province. The production team extends its thanks to our Chairs, Deans and administrative staff for their invaluable support!

Read more about the project on the AR Cité site.