Biography of a Street - Design Guidelines for Retelling the History of a Street Through the Use of an Immersive Virtual Tour

Abstract

It’s a challenge to present historical facts in an appealing and memorable fashion, especially to people who are not very interested in the history to begin with. Citizens in the 21st century can also feel the impacts of good urban planning done by urban planners in the past, increasing the appeal of exploring and analyzing the history of a street. With the surge of technological improvements to virtual reality, and to its affordability and accessibility, it’s a potential avenue for exploring history in an immersive and interactive medium. This thesis work aims to provide guidelines and a framework which designers can use to retell the history of a street - using interactive historical content, user experience design practices and artistic representations. A virtual tour prototype, based on the street Linnégatan in Gothenburg, Sweden, was created and used to evaluate users’ feedback over four iterations. The highlight of the prototype is the “Alternate History Concept” where users are given an option to change a critical urban planning event in the history to see its effects in the future. After a literature analysis and user evaluations, the results indicate that user experience designers could follow guidelines that can help them create memorable and immersive historical virtual tours. Additionally, the process that was used to create the prototype could be used as a framework for creating immersive and interactive virtual tours. The report details the theory and methodology used, the design, implementation and testing phases, as well as provides insights into potential use cases and future work. Certain concerns and pitfalls related to the technological tools that could be utilized are also discussed.