The City of Clearwater commissioned seven murals between 2018 and 2021. You can view the murals, along with their locations, on the City’s Downtown Clearwater Mural Program. As the artists painted, Clearwater’s Community Redevelopment Agency entered conversations with USF’s Access 3D Lab and Advanced Visualization Center.
“At that point in time, the idea of augmented reality murals was newer, more or less,” says CRA Manager Eric Santiago. “So it was definitely [something that] was not being offered in the area. There’s a lot more of them now. But when these conversations started back in 2019, it was more of a new concept."
Conversations slowed as the pandemic entered our collective realities in 2020. In 2021, USF’s Access 3D lab students and staff traveled to Downtown Clearwater and used laser scanners to capture four of the seven murals digitally. Using these digital models, USF’s Advanced Visualization Center established trigger points; each mural has three.
To view downtown Clearwater murals in AR, all you need do is download the Artours Clearwater app and drive to Downtown Clearwater. Then let your cell phone, the app, Google maps, and your two feet do the rest.
- Once you’re downtown, open the app, click start, and select the “mural map.” This opens Google maps.
- Tap on a mural title, then the associated pin, and the app gives your directions to that mural.
- After you’ve found your mural, tap the green button to “Begin Your Tour.” This opens a menu that lets you choose from four murals: Tony Krol and Michelle Sawyer’s “100 Years Before J. Cole,” MJ Lindo and Joshua Lawyer’s “After a While,” DAAS’ “Ikebana,” and Camilo Nuñez and Florencia Durán’s “Communidad.”
- When you open the app and point your phone at one of the trigger points, like the train in the center of “100 Years Before J. Cole,” a yellow circle appears on your phone like the sun. Tap the circle and it triggers an animation.
Now that the city has the AR technology in place, they plan to involve future mural artists in the AR planning process from the beginning.
Using Artours Clearwater app, I saw MJ Lindo and Joshua Lawyer’s gator in “After a While” walk from one end of the wall to the other. I saw the ocean appear in a wave. I saw the lilies bloom in DAAS’ “Ikebana” and watched bees feast upon their pollen. I looked on as a cluster of flowers popped up on the lawn before the mural, their bright colors attracting a hummingbird. Unfortunately, I didn’t see any animations in Florencia Duran and Camilo Nunez’s “Comunidad.”
As with any new technology, there are two ways to describe augmented reality—how it works in theory and how it works in fact. Or how it works and how it doesn’t work. If you’ve played with AR before, you know the technology can be…finicky. The problem is always with the triggering mechanism. Sometimes you point your phone at a painting and nothing happens.
At The Dali’s AR-fueled “Visual Magic” in 2019, nothing popped up until I’d centered the entire painting within my iPhone camera’s frame. That’s hard to do for a mural, and thankfully it wasn’t necessary in this case. But be prepared to get your steps in when you take Clearwater’s augmented reality mural tour. Like the gator in MJ Lindo and Joshua Lawyer’s “After a While,” you too might have to walk from one end of the wall to the other while seeking circles to tap on. I walked all over the parking lot in front of “Comunidad,” but I had no luck getting the animations to appear for this particular mural.
Clearwater’s ARTours isn’t perfect, but it’s an important step in revitalizing Downtown Clearwater.
“When you’re thinking of destinations and places you want to be, often you think of art and the cultural amenities that the area has to offer…” says Santiago.
If you’re heading into Downtown Clearwater for a concert in Coachman Park this fall, I suggest stepping out to see these murals as well.
“We just want to invite people downtown to check out the park,” Santiago told CL. “And then also, when they’re here, continue their journey through downtown. All of the art murals are within a short walk from the park. So you can do a nice little lap—see the park, leave the park, head into our downtown, see the murals, finish the lap, and make your way back into the park.”
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