Recently the University of Maryland announced the opening of a new diner, Yahentimitsi, which means “a place to go to eat” in the Algonquian language. This diner was named in conjunction with the American Indian tribe known as the Piscataway. The Piscataway tribe has been a recognized tribe in Maryland since 2012. In order to aid in the tribe's goals of promoting awareness, we created an AR experience to go along with the arrival of the new diner that will educate diner-goers on the history of the Piscataway tribe.
This experience was created using Unity and the Vuforia SDK. Vuforia was used to be able to scan the environment outside of the diner and place objects in the space that users would be walking through to get to the diner. The idea was to make it like a dinner and a movie, but turning it into an AR experience and a phone.
The experience aims at collaboration with the tribe, but for this prototype collaboration was not able to happen in time. By the Fall of 2022 an updated version of this experience will be available that has been developed in collaboration with the Piscataway tribe. The experience will be developed using 8th wall's image Targets and able to viewed within the diner.