Pearl Harbor Museum AR
An augmented reality experience bringing the events of Pearl Harbor to life.
The Pearl Harbor Aviation Museum AR experience engages visitors through immersive, fact-based storytelling. This Unity-built tablet app brings key events of the Attack on Pearl Harbor to life, overlaying historical events onto the present-day harbor view via 3D animations and archival footage.
As the lead for UX and visual design on this project, I closely collaboration with Unity developers to ensure alignment between design intentions and technical implementation, as well as on-site creative assessment and QA testing in Honolulu, Hawaii.
UX design
UI design
Prototyping
Usability testing
QA testing
Figma
Unity
Frame.io
6 months
Live
Create a modern visitor experience that educates guests on the events witnessed at the Control Tower, while honoring history and veterans with respectful storytelling.
In 2022, the museum completed a full renovation of the historic Control Tower. The tower was opened to the public for the first time in decades, offering a docent-guided tour with access to the observation deck.
Our stakeholders felt the tower tour was too minimal and outdated, using an older exhibition design style, and relying on sparse artifacts. With the 80th anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attacks fast approaching, the museum was set on revamping the tour to greet the increased flow of guests.
Our team launched a comprehensive round of stakeholder interviews, feedback analysis, and historical review, working hand-in-hand with the museum's Special Projects team and a World War II subject-matter expert to understand the attack timeline and importance of the Control Tower.
These findings set the foundation for our creative, narrative, and technical treatments:
Workshopping and discovery sessions with stakeholders guided our team to focus the experience on specific attack day events and stories:
We had an immense amount of archival, narrative, and historical content at our disposal. Our creative team discussed a few concepts that could bring these assets together to enrich the Control Tower tour. The concept that connected with museum stakeholders was a multi-touchpoint experience with three core areas:
As we waded into the project, two concerns arose:
My solution was to split the experience into two unique modes, distributing visitors around the space while softening prioritization of 3D animations: Map Mode and Window Mode.
3D animations playing over an extruded map in the center of the room.
3D-animated event scenes viewed through the tower windows.
I dove deep into different visual treatments and UI element designs for the Map Mode screens. I worked closely with our creative director to present a first iteration low-fi prototype, followed by a second iteration based on stakeholder feedback.
As production discussions about the 3D animations developed, it became clear that animations in both Map Mode and Window Mode would go beyond the client's budget.Our team reworked the AR experience again: Map mode would show static photographs and video content. Budget-intensive 3D animations would be accessible in Window Mode only.
The animation timeline scrubber, while liked by stakeholders, was too much of a reach for this project. We shelved the idea and removed interactivity within the animations.
I started my Window Mode process with explorations into WWII-ear military observation tools and game design references, keeping in mind my responsibility of designing a respectful, historically accurate experience.
After playing around with visual elements like lens reticles, binocular vignettes, radar widgets, and informational text, I brought together different treatments of these features into a set of style frames for the museum team to review.
The museum team chose the binocular-view style for its hyper-realism and similarity to how the observation deck crew witnessed the attack events. For visual cleanliness, we chose to drop the lens reticle and further simplify the radar widget.
I had the opportunity to join our creative director and Unity developer in Honolulu to test the AR application onsite. We did rigorous QA testing, ensuring the game engine was performing as expected and aligned with my Figma designs. Most importantly, we needed to ensure that the space was accurately mapped to properly trigger coordinate-based interactions.
Testing was a little tricky due to the tower being a closed military site, and the ongoing Top of the Tower tour. Accurate mapping of the space needed to be done without any obstructions for proper occlusion and 3D scanning.
I prepped a dev-ready file with annotations and handed it off to our Unity team. Throughout development, I worked closely with them to ensure fidelity between my Figma designs and the application, flag design discrepancies, and document buggy behavior.
The AR experience is now live at the Pearl Harbor Aviation Museum, educating and engaging visitors daily.
