Walking on Country

Walking on Country is a QUT campus experience that uses geo-location and augmented reality to guide users through sites of significance at Gardens Point. The app supports a self-guided walking tour connected to Aboriginal place, people, culture and Country.

I was brought into the project through QUT VISER because of my previous work on place-based AR experiences, particularly Old Government House AR Tours. My contribution was design support within the VISER team, helping shape how the AR and campus-wide experience could work for users moving through a real physical environment.

A campus-wide AR experience has to work across physical movement, wayfinding, interpretation, technical constraints and visitor attention. In this case, the work also needed to support cultural storytelling with care, making sure the digital layer served the content rather than becoming the focus.

The design challenge was to help make the experience usable in place: guiding people between points of interest, supporting moments of interpretation, and making the digital interactions feel connected to the physical campus.

Users follow a self-guided walking tour through seven points of interest around QUT Gardens Point. At each location, the app provides content connected to Aboriginal place, people, culture and Country, using AR and interactive elements to support the experience.

The app turns the campus into a place-based learning environment. The user is not just reading about history or culture from a distance; they are moving through the physical site while the digital layer provides context.

The Walking on Country app was recognised in QUT's Vice-Chancellors Awards for Excellence. I was part of the awarded professional staff team that worked collaboratively to develop the immersive storytelling app and bring the concept to life at Gardens Point.

Walking on Country shows how digital layers can support place-based learning when they are tied to real locations. The value of the experience comes from the relationship between the physical campus, the cultural content and the guided digital layer.

For my practice, it connects directly to the ongoing question of how digital tools can help people understand a place more deeply while remaining grounded in the real environment.

This project sits in the same lineage as my earlier AR tour work and my current guided digital experience practice. It reinforced the importance of designing for context: where someone is standing, what they need at that moment, and how much digital guidance is useful without overwhelming the physical experience.

This project reinforced the importance of designing digital experiences around place, cultural context and visitor movement. The technology needed to support the relationship between user, campus and story, rather than become the focus itself.