Making Meaningful Places: Augmented Reality for Digital Placemaking in Clearwater, Florida

Enhancing public art installations with augmented reality (AR) merges the physical and digital worlds and creates a strong sense of place attachment in urban settings. AR is an established tool for digital placemaking, which is a participatory form of embodied space-based social practice. While there is disagreement over whether digital placemaking is best achieved through organic engagement with locative media, deliberate urban planning initiatives, or a combination of both, it is increasingly clear that well-designed AR can impact how citizens perceive and engage with their physical surroundings and can invigorate urban spaces. In this article, we explore the design and development of ARTours Clearwater, an AR app that was developed as part of a city-led public art initiative aimed at increasing foot traffic and enlivening a downtown district through the creation of vivid, memorable, “imageable” spaces. The app development workflow encompassed terrestrial lidar scanning of the murals, the identification of tracking images in Vuforia, the development and scaling of digital animations in Unity, and onsite testing to evaluate environmental conditions. The project came to fruition at a public launch, which promoted novel forms of people-place interactions by bringing together multiple stakeholder groups in a synchronous event that enlivened the city’s downtown.