LOS ANGELES, Sept. 11, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- When the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History (MAH) reached out to local artists for its latest exhibition, SEE BE SEEN, COMMUNITY PORTRAITS, the enthusiastic response was a real win for a museum so passionately devoted to community involvement. But the hundreds of portraits submitted also presented a challenge. How could the museum hang the art, credit the artists and share their personal visions in a packed gallery? The solution was a combination of a uniquely designed display and a customized Augmented Reality (AR) app.

The portraits covered every square inch of the gallery walls - from floor to ceiling. This made it impossible to use traditional labels next to each work. The MAH provided visitors with printed layouts, but these were hard to read and only offered the name of each artist and the title of the corresponding artwork. Visitors wanted to explore more, and artists had interesting stories to share. There just wasn't an obvious way to do it.

To address this challenge, the MAH teamed up with North South Studios, the developer of Hoodoo, a free AR app. Using Hoodoo's image recognition capabilities, North South and MAH graphic designer, Michaela Clark-Nagaoka, were able to seamlessly provide visitors with information about each piece and artist via visitors' own smartphones.

"QR codes would not have worked," says Clark, "since they require putting codes on the images. NorthSouth came up with an elegant solution that fits the gallery's aesthetic and blended, not detracted, from the exhibit design. In the future I can imagine many different ways we could use Hoodoo to enrich visitor experiences."

"This is just one way cultural institutions can make use of Hoodoo," says Bill Newell, NorthSouth's CEO. There are multiple uses for museums, parks, monuments, historic neighborhoods—any number of places that would benefit from providing visitors with enhanced experiences. We were lucky to be given this opportunity to help the MAH explore alternate ways of presenting information." MAH director Nina Simon adds "This has been an exciting experiment as we continue to explore new ways to invite visitors to go deeper into exhibitions."

Hoodoo has already been used to publish engaging children's books, dynamic magazine ads and exciting mobile games. It has also been the driver of a set of video-enabled business cards and is slated for use in several industrial training and development courses.

Key features of Hoodoo include:

• Publish AR and MR experiences quickly and easily
• Easy-to use, cloud-based publishing system that allows user to create their own AR experiences without writing a single line of code
• Extensive analytics for stakeholders
• Publishers can make changes quickly and easily
• Supports video, animation, audio, text, 3D, and more
• English and Spanish language versions

To learn more about Hoodoo, go to http://www.gethoodoo.com/.

About North South Studios
North South Studios is a full-service digital studio specializing in innovative products for web, mobile and tablet platforms. As leaders in the Extended Reality revolution, we help clients explore diverse ways of effectively communicating with their target audiences. Whether your project is traditional or innovative, our developers are skilled at creating both front and back-end applications and offer complete solutions for your digital publishing needs.

To learn more about North South Studios, visit www.northsouthstudios.com.

For more information or to schedule an interview contact: 201336@email4pr.com 
Bill Newell +01 (310) 316-4349

SOURCE North South Studios

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