Hamilton Robson’s challenge was to connect more than 140 young voices, Joe Caslin’s large-scale artwork and an untouched Victorian warehouse, without letting the technology take over. The mobile AR experience needed to bring a life-sized guide character to life, help visitors find a personal route through the young people’s work, and eventually invite them to contribute a story of their own.
It also had to run reliably on visitors’ own phones inside a historic building with limited connectivity, while holding together more than 140 individual pieces of artwork, writing and film as one coherent, easy-to-navigate exhibition.
Hamilton Robson designed and built a Unity-based mobile AR app that wove together every part of the visitor journey from an opening questionnaire with six themed questions styled as six hands-on industrial machines, through a life-sized AR guide character, to a personalised route through the young people’s artwork and spoken word.
The guide character was brought to life using a combination of motion-capture technologies and tools to curate personalised content refined by hand to create a believable animated presence rooted in the artist’s original drawing.
Behind the scenes, Hamilton Robson’s in-house content platform organised over 140 individual contributions of artwork, spoken word and film into a single structured system, powering the app, the AR overlays and a set of specially converted rotary telephones that let visitors dial into recordings.
Because on-site connectivity couldn’t be relied on, the team re-engineered content delivery so the exhibition could run from the device itself, optimising and packaging media differently for iOS and Android to meet app store constraints.
A guided AR placement pattern of recognise, align, confirm, kept the experience reliable across a large, challenging warehouse space, while a Story Exchange feature, powered by Hamilton Robson’s AI storytelling technology, let visitors record and contribute their own story back into the exhibition.
Outpouring opened Riddel’s Warehouse to the public, with young people’s voices filling its walls, phones and open atrium. Several hundred visitors explored the exhibition in the first few days alone, navigating the experience on their own phones with no app familiarity required.
The project demonstrated that Hamilton Robson’s approach to mixed-reality storytelling – combining bespoke motion capture, advanced production and reliable on-site delivery – can scale to support ambitious, emotionally significant public installations, while keeping the technology in service of the story rather than at the centre of it.
