PickRick (AR Museum Experience)

This project seeks to explore Augmented Reality as a way of making history visible in a location-based installation that recreates a series of peaceful protests and lawsuits, happened over 8 months in the 1960s, that accured againt the Pickrick restaurant, which is now part of the Georgia Tech campus.

On July 3 1964, the day after the Civil Rights Act was passed, George Willis, Jr, Albert L. Dunn, and Woodrow T. Lewis, all ministers and students at the Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta, attempted to gain entry to the Pickrick restaurant a notorious bastion of resistance to integration. The events of that day became the basis of the first lawsuit brought under that Act, filed by the legendary Constance Baker Motley of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.

Over the next few months the owner of the restaurant, future Georgia governor Lester Maddox, tried renaming the restaurant and changing the signage to evade the legal process, but a rotating group of non-violent protesters risked violence at the hands of armed mobs in order to repeatedly demonstrate that the restaurant was acting in violation of the Civil Rights Act. They eventually forced Maddox to close and so that on February 23 1965 Jack Googer, who worked on Peachtree Street, was able to peacefully sit down to lunch in the now renamed Gateway Cafeteria. Soon after, the restaurant was bought by Georgia Tech, and after about 50 years of use as an administration building and a campus police station, it has now been torn down to make way for the Eco-Commons.

This project is an exercise in using Augmented Reality storytelling to make the invisible visible in two ways. First we worked to project the image of the building and animated recreations of the protests onto the very changed current landscape. Second, we attempted to beyond the usual protagonist of the story – the segregationist fried chicken seller — to bring into the non-violent protesters into the foreground.

The Experience

Timeline

The Pickrick Project begins alongside an EcoCommons’ wall, introducing users to the experience through a series of slides projected onto the wall in augmented reality.

Users are introduced to key historical events of the Civil Rights Movement including the push for Atlanta to live up to its title as an “open city”, and the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Before entering the inner space of the experience and being introduced to the “Four Ministers”, users hear LBJ signing the Civil Rights Act into law.

AR Experience

After meeting the ministers, markers guide visitors through the sequence of court actions and on-site confrontations which culminated in the closing of the Pickrick and its reopening as the integrated Gateway cafeteria.