Gonzalo Orce Portfolio

RailXR

RailXR

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”, was presented at the GI Workshop 2026 on Virtual and Augmented Reality in Wiesbaden on 24 September 2026, in Session 4, “XR for Accessibility, Training and Real-World Contexts” (programme). It is to appear in the Gesellschaft für Informatik Lecture Notes in Informatics (LNI). It has also been selected for an oral presentation and a poster at the UnitedXR Europe 2026 Scientific Conference in Brussels on 8 December 2026.

Teaser, recorded at Bahnpark Augsburg in July 2026.
RailXR interface seen through the Spectacles: the Orient Express glyph with a 3.4 m distance readout and a floor trail, over the real locomotive
Diagram of the narrator video pipeline: reference image and ElevenLabs voice track, vocal separation, Wan 2.1 with InfiniteTalk, SeedVR2 upscale, matting, H.264 encode
Diagrams: top-down plan of the six storypoints around the Imperial Train and the Orient Express, and the 46 degree display cone against the wider visual field
Charts of the summative study: System Usability Scale mean 85.4 against the benchmark of 68, and UEQ-S scores of +1.81 pragmatic, +2.28 hedonic, +2.11 overall
Figures from my master’s thesis, “AR Smart Glasses Museum Guide for Bahnpark Augsburg” (Hochschule Darmstadt, August 2026). The results come from an on-site study with 18 invited adult visitors in July 2026.
RailXR paper talk at the GI Workshop 2026 on Virtual and Augmented Reality, Wiesbaden - view from the audience
RailXR paper talk at the GI Workshop 2026 on Virtual and Augmented Reality, Wiesbaden - speaker at the lectern
The paper talk at the GI Workshop 2026, Wiesbaden, 24 September 2026.
RailXR - press article, Landsberger Tagblatt

From Landsberger Tagblatt, April 2026.

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