AR GUIDE | HOCHSCHULE DARMSTADT | BAHNPARK AUGSBURG | 2026

TOOLS: LENS STUDIO | COMFYUI | PHOTOSHOP | PREMIERE

An AR guide for Snap Spectacles Gen 5, built as my master’s thesis at Hochschule Darmstadt. The venue is Bahnpark Augsburg – a heritage-listed 1906 locomotive roundhouse that’s home to one of southern Germany’s largest historical train collections. It centres on the museum’s new permanent exhibition “Time Travel: Locomotives tell European history”, with two standout exhibits: the Imperial Train of Empress Elisabeth and the Orient Express.

The experience layers virtual historical characters, European history and the physical trains themselves – visitors move through story points at their own pace. Control is by gaze and hand gesture, with voice input across 40+ languages as a fallback through Snap OS. Because the Spectacles are lightweight and standalone, visitors stay visible to each other the whole time. Visitor testing at the museum took place in late July 2026.

diekunstbaustelle.de/project/railxr-im-bahnpark-augsburg

bahnpark-augsburg.de

Supervised by Prof. Dr. Jan Barkmann and Prof. Dr. Paul Grimm. Conceived and directed overall by Wolfgang Hauck (dieKunstBauStelle e.V.).

A paper on the project, “Designing a Hands-Free AR Museum Guide for Railway Heritage: Design Rationale and Summative Findings on Snap Spectacles”, has been accepted for the GI Workshop 2026 on Virtual and Augmented Reality (Wiesbaden, 23-24 September 2026) and is to appear in the Gesellschaft für Informatik Lecture Notes in Informatics (LNI). It is on the programme for Session 4, “XR for Accessibility, Training and Real-World Contexts”, on 24 September, 13:00-14:15.

From Landsberger Tagblatt, April 2026.

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