The Broonie

The Broonie is a mixed reality story app featuring a tech-savvy and mischievous Scottish house gnome. It introduced participants at a residential three day sandpit event to a range of current mobile technologies in a fun and engaging way.

Responsibilities

I worked with Dr Debbie Maxwell, Lecturer in Interactive Media at University of York, to develop an iPad app that guides users through six rooms of the beautiful Salisbury Green Hotel. It centers on the audible (and invisible) digital character Jack. He is a tech-savvy (twittering) and mischievous Broonie (a Scottish house gnome), voiced using the Scottish Speech Synthesis API developed by Cereproc. Jack introduces himself by kindly asking participants to refrain from touching the bowl of milk and honey, made to look to be left out for him by superstitious hotel staff.

Achievements

By using the app, participants were able to follow Jack around the hotel and go on a journey involving mysteries, creative ideation of personas, hands-on experience of Augmented Reality technology ("Broonie Vision"), embedded electronics, hidden message in RFID tags and 3D printed objects. The experience is wrapped in effective and engaging story telling techniques that resolves tension at the end of the experience. The work formed the basis for a joint paper published in the 2015 ACM SIGCHI Conference on Creativity and Cognition (see publications). Read more about the work in the publication.