3 AR TRANSMEDIA COMPANION
A second application developed in the Augmented Environments
Lab that features on-location panorama viewing is The Walking
Dead AR Transmedia Companion. This experience combines
content from The Walking Dead television and comic book series
with real world panoramas taken in Atlanta, Georgia, USA; a
location featured within the storyline of the fictional series. This
experience provides a transmedia presentation that blends
fictional and real-world content, taking inspiration from Wither’s
and colleague’s The Westwood Experience [6].
The transmedia companion provides users with a marked-up
Google Map containing POI’s that relate content from The
Walking Dead to the series’ real-world locational counterparts.
The POI’s on the map open panoramas overlaid with scenes from
the television and comic series. As with the trail guide
application, these panoramas are used as a proxy for see-through
video in order to improve registration of content over the location
where the user is standing, when they are standing near the
epicenter of a panorama. In Figure 4, The Atlanta skyline is
overlaid with a fictional scene from the television series, which
can be juxtaposed with an analogous image from the comic book
series. This allows fans of the story to draw comparisons between
the series’ different media forms while simultaneously inhabiting
the real-world space from which the series takes inspiration. This
design is intended to facilitate a mixed reality experience on
several levels [2].
Figure 4: Transmedia panorama series. Left: unaltered panorama.
Center: Television overlay. Right: analogous comic book overlay.
In addition to static imagery, other panoramas from The Walking
Dead application insert videos from the television series into the
panoramas, affording users the approximation of being in the
presence of characters from the fictional world.