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
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
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