Art is meant to be felt

Historically, art guides have been academic encyclopedias or crowded group tours. Storia bridges the gap. By combining real-time camera recognition with storytelling crafted by world-class Roman docents, you unlock the psychological tension, political drama, and technical genius behind every brushstroke.

Identify masterworks

I thought it would be great to simply aim your camera at a painting or sculpture and instantly it recognizes the artwork. It knows the exact church through GPS location you are standing in. No QR codes, no physical markers. Pure visual alignment.

This needed lots of testing, going to the churches, during different times because it was quite hard to make it work in low-light chapels.
I wanted our app to be working even without internet, because big brick walls of cathedrals block connections.
So to have immediate audio playback, I came with the following solution:
Pre downloaded tours, when you start a tour, it will gradually download the predefined stories about the artwork that you are about to see.

Being able to ask questions, about interactivity

A dilemma. I needed interactivity to work because one might have questions about the origins of the artwork. Having a predefined system takes away the intelligence, so, I came up with the following: a list of up to 6 predefined questions that would be answered by our narrator. Lazlo.

AI Persona

I came up with a persona for our Narrator. To make her believable and act as a ‘real’ person, she needed a backstory. Since I have been watching nature series of BBC I have been drawn to the fantastic accent of the British. My persona needed to be from around Cambridge. By making sure her persona, backstory was in line with the AI systems in place, the AI knows what to generate and in what kind of tone.