2023 saw The Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras and World Pride unite for a truly global celebration of queerness – a first for the Southern Hemisphere. However, given the rapid rate of development in Sydney, much of our local queer history has either been displaced or disappeared entirely. We wanted to do something about it - and ensure that people visiting the Sydney World Pride 2023 festival can discover this history in a new and exciting way. To achieve this, we collaborated with Meta, World Pride, and the Pride History Group to provide technical, design, and historical expertise.

"Walk With Pride" is an AR filter where users visit various locations within Sydney and learn about the LGBTQIA+ history surrounding those places. Using Spark AR’s Real World Scale AR technology, we are able to project these histories onto the sites in AR space and bring them to life. Users will discover these stories as they visit the various locations scattered on an educational history trail. Through AR, we can create a way to capture and retell LGBTQIA+ and First Nations history in an innovative, respectful, and non destructive way - thereby preserving these stories for future generations

When the user loads the filter on Instagram, they will be presented with the location menu. Users can tap on the location they are currently visiting to view the activation for that historic site. As the user discovers each historic site, this menu will tick them off to gamify their progress. When the user selects the appropriate historic location, they are currently visiting, the filter will then prompt them to “Find a flat surface”. This is used to track a ground plane that the 3D AR scene can be placed onto. When the ground plane has been successfully tracked, an outline of the historic site is revealed. Users will need to point their phone until the outline of the site aligns to the real-world site. With the AR scene aligned and locked onto the historic site, the pride stories will appear written over the top and wrapped across the conforms of the structure. Users can walk around the outskirts of the building in AR space to reveal more of this story written on the sides. These stories consist of typography, animated symbols, and pictures that illustrate vignettes and quotes taken from interviews and historical archives through the Pride History Group.

We chose to go for a menu where users have the ability to select which location they are currently visiting because the geo-anchoring technology present in filters such as Coachellaverse is currently only accessible through a beta program. We have instead chosen to focus on Real World Scale AR as the feature to explore with this filter as it allows us to easily overlay our AR scene on reality without requiring the users to manually adjust the size.

The visual design was adapted from collage style of the World Pride 2023 promotional material carefully to ensure branding and style consistency.