Educating Sophia Jex-Blake
Design
Narrative
Animation
Research
Overview
Honours Project made for my Undergrad. This is based around the life of Sofia Jex-Blake and her struggles to get education. It involves starting at Edinburgh Waverly, and then walking around following locations, while being read letters from the subject and interspersed with sections of AR, linking the place to the events.
Research
This project involved finding and parsing through a vast amount of information, both technical in how to design and build in AR, and historical, with the subject and sources mostly being from the late 19th, early 20th centuries. I quickly identified the best source was going to be the biography written by Jex-Blakes' partner. This had an effect on how the story was framed, as letters to her partner, but did pose a problem. This source was going to be biased. I tried to back up this information in other ways to compensate for this, however this is difficult, since this is most peoples primary source. This was a wider problem, the miss reporting of events. For instance, there was a riot, the Surgeons Hall Riot, which people, even at the time, got wrong, so this required as parsing of many newspapers of the time to get as accurate of an accounting as possible. There was an effort made to make the app as period typical as possible.
Design
This project was made, from the ground up, by me. The first step I took was to decide what features I wanted to include. The next was testing them and finding out some were out with my ability to implement myself. For instance, I wanted to include GPS capabilities, however this was outside my abilities within the time, so I found a workaround, in this case linking to google maps instead.
The whole idea is linking the modern player to the historical figure. As such the information is framed as being written letters between Jex-Blake and her partner. The map used is a historically accurate map and the locations used are as close as they can be to the real locations the events took place.
The most difficult part of this project was making sure it was both interesting and included only accurate information, but I think in the end it was everything it needed to be.
