Digital Culture & AudioVisual Challenges

AR Timemachine

Interactive AR wall paintings, at the 1st Model Junior High School of Athens

Within the framework of the afternoon school clubs at the 1st Model Junior High school of Athens, an ongoing project of interactive wall paintings through AR has been developed during the academic years 2021-2024, shaped around an idea born during the Covid-19 pandemic. The project is a fruitful collaboration of the art club “Humanity Timemachine” and the IT club “Mobile Devices Programming” of the school. The members of these two clubs are students 13 to 15 years old, with special interest in art and/or programming.

The large scale wall paintings drawn on the walls of the school’s stairway by the students/members of the “Timemachine” club depict different phases of the evolution of life and human civilization on Earth, aiming to create a daily experienced and "alive" historical timeline. The round shape of the paintings refers to the windows of an unknown spaceship traveling through time. At the time being this “timemachine” consists of “windows” with views to the first periods of life on Earth, millions of years ago, placed on the ground floor of one of the school’s buildings, in chronological order: the first life in the sea, the first insects, reptiles and birds, the mammals and dinosaurs, followed by the great volcanic eruptions, the asteroid catastrophe and the ice age. As the stair of the school starts going up, the paintings-“windows” depict the first human species and civilizations, starting from the Paleolithic era and cavemen, followed by the first settlements. As we move up the stair the civilizations evolve. We can see the first great civilizations in the Mediterranean: Mesopotamia, Egypt and Greece. At the present, the art club members are painting the “Timemachine windows” representing the Minoan era, the Cycladic civilization, the Mycenaean era and are preparing to complete the ancient world civilizations with wall paintings dedicated to the Archaic art, the Classical era, Macedonia and Alexander the Great, the Hellenistic and Ancient Roman civilizations.

During their preparation in small groups, in order to create each wall painting, the students have been researching on the referring civilization and have been creating original digital content-texts, images, sketches, short animations. This material has been uploaded on a timeline at Padlet application, following the time order of the civilization phases. 

During the academic year 2021-2022, the IT club “Mobile Devices Programming” used the Augmented Reality (AR) application ARTIVIVE to turn the first completed paintings to an interactive sensation for all the students, teachers and visitors of the school, adding public domain videos to the experience and making the wall paintings “come to life” when the visitor used a device to observe them. The next year (2022-2023), as the painting work continued, the IT club members managed to create a program themselves, to augment the wall paintings and connect them to the original digital content already produced by the students.

In the following presentation we may see how this project developed through the years in the 1st Model Junior High school of Athens. How did the art club “Humankind Timemachine” work in groups with their visual arts teacher Eugenia E. Palla, researching, writing, making digital content, creating preliminary sketches, testing and finally drawing on the school’s walls to create the wall paintings? How did the IT club “Programming Mobile Devices” work with their IT teacher Sofia Mougiakou to create the interaction and connect the wall paintings to the students’ original digital content and videos?

Finally we will see the completed result and the visitors’ experience of this combined work, and understand how the power of collaboration can form a creative time-space in the school between students and teachers, that produces enthusiasm and wellbeing along with the cultivation of knowledge, multiple skills and aesthetics.