I am designing this QR-accessible, AR-adjacent learning experience for visitors to the Heard Opera House. The learning gap is experiential: Visitors may stand in or near the historic space without being able to imagine how people once approached it, moved through it or gathered there for a public performances. Rather than relying on static wall text alone, this prototype uses mobile access, guided attention, sound, visual reconstruction and archival detail to help visitors sense the opera house as an inhabited place in 1896 McKinney.

In this project, I am working as instructional designer to a restoration architect as subject matter expert. The SME’s reconstruction of the performance hall will become the visual basis for an AR-adjacent overlay, allowing visitors to compare the present-day space with a historically informed rendering of the former interior. My role is to translate that expert architectural knowledge into a learner-centered spatial experience.

The central design challenge is to open visitors’ historical imagination while working within real constraints of time, cost, access and tool feasibility. Because true augmented reality would require a more complex technical build, I chose an AR-adjacent approach presented in Articulate Rise, selected for its mobile-responsive format and suitability for QR-code access on visitors’ phones. Each design decision is tied to attention and cognitive load: street-level audio introduces carriage sounds, footsteps and distant voices; the entry sequence shifts the sound indoors; the lobby uses narration and ambient sound; the hall includes archival reference to John Philip Sousa’s appearance there in 1896. A 360-degree architectural rendering of the reconstructed performance hall will allow visitors to glimpse the opera house interior where a suite of hotel rooms now exists. Clickable details become portals into archival materials without overwhelming the visitor.

This project is still in an early design stage. I have clarified audience, learning problem, tool choice and overall direction of the visitor experience, The next phase will involve developing formal design documentation, including wireframe, screenplan and storyboarding, while integrating archival materials and refining the reconstruction overlay.