AR Museum App

Overview

Collecting Crave (Sammel Sucht) was a WebAR experience built with 8th Wall that explored digital collecting as a social ritual. Commissioned as part of a gallery residency, the project invited participants to spin through objects drawn from a museum’s digital collection, curate their selections, and arrange them on a physical target image in AR. My role included leading the interaction design, UX, visual direction, and concept development, with the goal of testing how collecting could take on new forms in augmented reality.

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Outcomes

• Created a browser-based AR experience that allowed participants to curate and spatially arrange museum artifacts in real-world environments
• Demonstrated how collecting behaviors could be reframed as shared, performative rituals through interactive technology
• Engaged hundreds of gallery visitors and showed the potential of WebAR for accessible, large-scale participation without hardware barriers

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Reflection

This project underscored how interaction patterns around collecting, such as curation, display, and exchange, can be extended into digital contexts while retaining their social resonance. Working with WebAR made the experience immediately accessible, showing how ritual-like behaviors can scale in public settings. It also hinted at broader applications for product design that blends cultural practice with emerging technology.

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Promo video about the artist's work and intent behind the app.

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Problem Statement

Due to space limitations, 95% of museum, art collections are kept in storage and not accessible to visitors. The only way to engage with these collections are through online digital archives (usu. indexes of photos, metadata, .CSVs), which they aren’t user-friendly or engaging for most art lovers.

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Market Opportunity

Major Enterprise Customer Base

There are more than 55,000 museums in the world, with 35,000 in North America. Only a small number (~2,500) have virtual web experiences, meaning there’s a big potential market (Google Arts & Culture).

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Huge Digital Collections

The largest museums have significant digital collections that we can leverage for our app:

• Library of Congress | 17.0 M objects
• Smithsonian | 37.0M objects
• British Museum | 4.5M objects

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Massive User Interest

Search queries for online museums surged to an an all-time high during the pandemic!

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Our Solution

Collecting Crave is asset-viewing platform (disguised as a fun, mobile game) that allows you to view an institution’s entire art collection (and more) using augmented reality and 3D modeling.

• No physical space limitations (display 100% of your collection)
• Flexible media formats (photos, video, 3D / AR models)
• Gamifies art experiences, and adds visual, social, emotional components to lifeless digital archives
• Option to license and display art from other collections
• Track which objects in digital collection are most popular

We’ve received major grants from the Smithsonian, Mozilla Foundation and others. We’re already working with major museums around the world to validate, test the prototype.