Sheridan College · Contract · Summer 2023

Portals to the Past

Spatial Design AR Cinema 4D Spark AR

  
    Role
    Interaction designer — 3D, interaction, AR build
  
    Client
    Sheridan College · Trafalgar campus
  
    Team
    Two interaction designers, one experiential designer, faculty lead
  
    Tools
    Cinema 4D · Spark AR · Instagram
  
    Delivered
    Four of eight installations, live August 2023

The commission

A humanities professor ran an elective where students went through news archives for events that happened on Sheridan's Trafalgar campus. He wanted the findings out of the classroom and into the building itself, and he had a phrase for it before anyone had a method: a portal to the past. He asked Adobe how to build it. Adobe told him to ask his own college's interaction design department. The department posted the job that summer.

The building is the interface

Each installation was pinned to the place its story happened. A vase appeared on a display stand left deliberately empty, with a tracking target on the surface. An IBM 360 rendered at real size in what used to be the computer room. The campus map sat at the main entrance. AR was the delivery method — the site did the work.

A poster went up at each location, made by the experiential designer on the team. Scan the QR code, an Instagram filter opens, the filter reads a marker or a surface, and the piece appears where it belongs.

Four installations

The campus, as drawn

One surviving archive photograph shows the original plans for Trafalgar. The model reconstructs the campus from it — buildings labelled, grounds laid out, the version that existed on paper before it existed in brick. It sat at the main entrance, where the difference between the plan and the building you're standing in is easiest to notice.

THE ARCHIVEOne photograph survives of the original Trafalgar plans. Building placement, the grounds, the roads — everything in the model is read off that single image.

A vase that isn't there

A glass vase, gifted to the Queen on a campus visit, now in a royal collection somewhere. The display stand stayed empty on purpose with a target on its surface. Scan the poster, point the phone at the empty case, and the vase is in it. You can walk around it.

TRACKINGTwo methods, depending on the site. Where content sat flat against a wall, the poster was the marker. The vase used surface detection off the empty display case, so it could be walked around instead of viewed head-on.

One IBM 360, actual size

Modelled to the machine's real dimensions. The poster in the old computer room doubled as the tracking target, so the 360 appeared in the room that used to hold it, at the size it used to take up. The point wasn't the object. It was the floor space.

The theatre

A stage with curtains, working spotlights, and mounted photographs, running under a voice over about the theatre program and the people who started it.

What the platform cost

Spark AR, delivered through Instagram, was the platform available in the time we had. That put a Meta account between a person and a poster on a wall, and assumed they'd know what to do once the filter opened. Instruction was one line of text. The people most likely to give up were the ones the project was built for: students walking past with a phone already in their hand and no reason to sign into anything.

What got cut

The map was meant to help navigation. Trafalgar is genuinely hard to move through, and a scale model at the entrance looked like a fun fix. Tracking needed a target meaning people couldn’t walk with the map open, so the map shipped as a view of the original plans instead.

The fallback was smaller: markers on the model showing where the other installations were, turning the campus into a route worth walking. This got cut due to deadline issues.

Where it landed

Installed on campus in August 2023 — eight pieces across Trafalgar, four of them mine, each anchored to the spot its story belonged to. Meta has since discontinued Spark AR, which takes the delivery layer with it. I would like to eventually revisit and refactor the project as I see genuine value in it.