GamAR at the National Maritime Museum

Some time ago I read about the GamAR app for mobile devices. Which allows visitors to a number of heritage sites to download a (sometimes free, sometimes paid for) Augmented Reality Game based around the site. Last week I finally got to give it a go, when I visited the National Maritime Museum. The app had been sitting unused on my iPad for months. Now I had the oppurtunity to download a game a take it to the museum.

Here’s a thing – there’s a free game you can download for the Cutty Sark, but we’d been there a year or so ago, before GamAR came out, and didn’t want to repeat that visit yet. Now the Great Explorer game in the NMM itself appeared to be free on my iPad, so I downloaded that. But when my wife tried to download it into her’s she was asked to pay for it (so she didn’t – we took mine).

If I had had to pay, I’d have been cross, because it didn’t work. It started up and wanted access to the iPad’s camera, which I allowed, but the camera images wouldn’t appear on the game screen, so after some fiddling, I gave up and borrowed one of the museum’s Android tablets so my family could try it out.

 

It’s a simple but fun scavenger hunt around a giant map on the mezzanine level of the Museum’s roofed-in courtyard. The kids had to move from port to port, finding out a little about each country and picking up items and crew that allowed them, eventually to level up to Grand Admiral (huzzah). The Android tablet was quite heavy, and my boy gave up after a while with tired arms, so his sister completed the quest.

It was notable that there were few others playing the game, even though the borrowed tablets were free. I saw just one other player while we were there. There were plenty of kids playing on the map, though. But they were just playing, running and rolling around on its soft surface. Of course when they occasionally rolled under where my kids were point the tablet, the image recognition that powers the app failed and we’d have to wait a while for them to roll out of the way.

A regular visitor we were with, wasn’t even aware of the game, despite the massive banners around the map advertising it. This speaks to my continuing (but as yet unmeasured – I wonder how I might go about that?) suspicion that very few people actually want to play games when they are “doing heritage”.

Meanwhile, many more visitors where enjoying another playful intervention at Royal Museums Greenwich. Up the hill, at the Royal Observatory a number of items had been removed from show there, to appear in the Museum’s Longitude exhibition. To take their places in the observatory, the museum had brought in a number of Steampunk writers, artists and makers to create an alternate history of longitude.

The especially made exhibits were fun, but my favourite aspect was the rewriting of labels for items from the museum’s permanent collection. By way of example have a look at this picture:

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Got it?

Now read the caption and suddenly the picture becomes a lot more frivolous:

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A lot more fun, for me at least, than GamAR’s efforts.


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I came to cultural heritage via five years working at Midland Bank when I left school. In my free time, I volunteered as a costumed interpreter at Kentwell Hall and, with re-enactment societies, at various medieval sites around the UK and France. When, one evening, a few of us said “we could make a business out of this” I left my job at the bank to go to college, first to get an Art Foundation and then to Manchester Polytechnic to join an innovative course called Design for Communications Media. I specialised in Educational Media Design, with the intention of applying what I was learning to cultural heritage. During my vacations and upon graduation I worked for the nascent company my friends had started, Past Pleasures, creating immersive living history festivals at Lancaster and Tunbridge Wells, as well as projects including: an exhibition for the centenary of the Commonwealth Institute; a design for a metafictional Sherlock Holmes exhibition in Croydon; and, a game that combined real-time investment advice from 300 year-old characters at the Bank of England Museum with a digital simulation, tracking the players’ investment portfolio from the founding of the bank to its tercentenary. In 1996 I helped found JMD&Co, and for two years I also lectured on Heritage Tourism and Visitor Management and Interpretation modules for a Portsmouth University validated HND/degree course at Farnborough Technical College. Subsequently, I enrolled in the new Distance Learning delivered Masters’ degree in Museum Studies at Leicester University, where I became interested in the social use of space, particularly Bill Hillier’s “space syntax,” and the increasing futility of cultural heritage sites trying to tell doggedly linear stories in three-dimensional spaces. Although my dissertation explored models for mapping interpretation, and particularly learning styles, onto spaces, a satisfactory reconciliation of linear story and three-dimensional space eluded me. After graduation, I decided my time in the “small business” end of cultural heritage was over for a while, and I left JMD&Co to join a cultural institution, the National Trust, as a Regional Community, Learning and Volunteering Manager. I brought the first National Trust iPad into use at Batemans, where, combined with a wax cylinder record player, and the help of renowned folk singer, Jon Boden, we’ve returned Rudyard Kipling’s voice back into his old home. However, one of the innovations which I am most proud of is the National Trust’s virtual tours. Working with a small company, and a range of disabled stakeholders, we created a touch-screen based human computer interface that could also, if required, be controlled with other input devices, and allowed visitors with a variety of disabilities to fully enjoy the virtual tour. The teams’ achievement was recognised with a Jodi Award for Excellence in accessible digital media in 2008.

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