Japanese Tea Gardens Case Study
Client & Background:
The San Antonio Parks Foundation is a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting and enhancing the parks in San Antonio and Bexar County. The famous Japanese Tea Gardens are among the parks they operate and maintain to preserve history. The San Antonio Parks Foundation was looking for a new and innovative method to inform and entertain the thousands of guests the garden sees each year.
The Challenge:
The Japanese Tea Gardens have over a century’s worth of history and a wealth of natural beauty to offer guests. The San Antonio Parks Foundation wanted to offer an experience that let people of all ages interact with the garden in a fun and educational way. They wanted to give people something to interact with as they walked about the tea gardens. The solution needed to be fun and something guests could get invested in, without distracting them from the garden itself. For this reason, traditional methods of environmental education, like signage and brochures, would not work.
Objectives:
Develop a solution that informs, educates, and entertains guests of the garden.
Ensure the solution is low profile and doesn’t distract people from the garden.
Solutions:
The San Antonio Parks Foundation partnered with Geomedia to create the Japanese Tea Garden Augmented Reality (AR) app, an application designed for smartphones and tablets that would allow users to interact with the garden in a unique way. Using the camera on a phone, users could walk around the gardens and use AR to see hidden pictures and sights through the lens of their device. The app also includes interactive timelines and history that supplement the gardens with a wealth of background knowledge that can be easily accessed by any guest.
The app contained content for all ages including a chance to digitally color a koi fish, a map with specific points of interest for the guest to explore and interact with and collect badges as they visited, a series of historical themed puzzles to solve, and even take pictures of an AR simulated dragon.
Results:
The app brought the visitor experience of the Japanese Tea Gardens to another level. The immersive experience was educational in how it demonstrated the history and chronological ecology of the gardens, but also entertaining with how it presented fun minigames and ways to interact with the garden. All of this without blocking the line of sight with traditional signage and keeping the beauty of the gardens intact.
