AR.bangelio Experiment: Two cities, graffiti and augmented storytelling.

It was a regular morning of 2011 in Santo Domingo when I started noticing these little signs. 

They popped everywhere, small pieces of wood with really striking and heavily religious messages. Same handwriting, maybe one person did them all. It was impossible for me to ignore them, and after a while, I started a photo project to document them under the name #Urbangelio. The archive has now over 400 pictures.

The curious thing is that these signs are not just placed randomly in the city. These messages are basically targeted ads, and the things happening around that location are somewhat reflected in the signs.

For example, in the heart of the slums, where you can find unhoused people living with addiction, you could see signs related to the issue, urging people to stop consuming drugs.

In front of the National Lottery Building, you could find signs that disapprove of gambling, claiming the "the devil itself" invented it.

Even in front of funeral houses, preaching that if someone "dies without Christ" everything spent on funeral ceremonies is wasted money.

Leaving religious biases aside, this peculiar signs often refer to a wide range of problematic realities that affect Dominican Society every day.

Now I'm living in Madrid, where people "take the street as their diary" - as a friend once told me - filling them with stories of collective interest, denounces, stuff they think should change and I couldn't disregard the similarities in the topics of the messages posted here and those of Urbangelio back in Santo Domingo.

This makes me believe that if the person who writes the #Urbangelio lived here, they would definitely have some messages to hang on the wall...

So, why not bring them over?

I used this data and developed an Android app that reads the user's location and allows them to project an augmented reality scene containing the Urbangelio signs that most relate to the graffiti in that area. While this is happening, an audio track tells the story the signs might be referring to and how this particular situation happening in Madrid could relate to another one happening in Santo Domingo, proving that a single piece of graffiti could tell stories from two different cities.

To make this a completely immersive experience, the user will be wearing a custom haptic vest embedded with vibrators that will enhance the audio track, so not only they could see and listen to the story, but feel it vividly in their body and relate much more to it.

My dear friend Rachad tested the wearable, and he clearly felt the vibes!

Don't COVID-panic!! All the electronic components on the wearable are detachable, which means the device can be perfectly washed after used.

On the AR scene in the demo below, generated using #Rhino3D, the user can explore two different graffiti expressions refering to the same societal issue while the vibratory feedback from the vest emphasizes the story of the audio track.

This experiment aims to provide the user's a new perspective of the city and ignite their curiousity about current events that directly affect urban life, here or anywhere.

I presented AR.bangelio as my Final Project to obtain the master's degree in Digital Fabrication for Interaction from IED Madrid in August, 2020. Thanks to Japi Contonente, Jorge Gomez Arenas, Cesar Garcia, Alice Zainoun, and Luix for their invaluable help to finish this prototype, and to my dear friends for their support. See some pictures of the fabrication process below.

Kelvin Feliz. Madrid, 2020.