Untold, AR city storytelling app
Summary
Untold is a location-based augmented reality app that layers the forgotten legends of Milan onto the real city locations where they happened. Users are guided to a physical spot, scan it, and the story reveals itself through augmented reality on their screen. Characters appear, narratives unfold, and the city itself becomes the stage. The prototype was built using Adobe Aero and tested in real Milan locations with real users.
Context and Problem
Cities carry stories that most of their residents have never heard. Untold was designed to change that, using augmented reality to make forgotten city legends discoverable in the places where they actually happened, for a generation that already lives through a screen.
My Role
This was a team project with five teammates: Riccardo Agosto, Marco Da Re, Chiara Lenna, Swareena Joshi, and Claudia Massimi.
My contributions spanned the full project: user and market research, service and system design, information architecture, UX/UI design, AR implementation using Adobe Aero, prototyping, social media content, and marketing planning.
Research
Demographics & Numbers
We ran mixed-method research before designing anything.
20 in-depth interviews with millennials aged 20 to 30, drawn from a multicultural panel across Italy, France, Turkey, India, and South Korea, 14 Italian residents and 6 international participants. Professions deliberately varied: designers, engineers, academics, cooks, and lawyers.
20 in-depth interviews with millennials aged 20 to 30, drawn from a multicultural panel across Italy, France, Turkey, India, and South Korea, 14 Italian residents and 6 international participants. Professions deliberately varied: designers, engineers, academics, cooks, and lawyers.
207 online survey responses from across the world, 137 from 18 Italian cities and 70 from 48 foreign cities.
Findings
The findings pointed in a consistent direction: people need to feel a sense of belonging to their city and want to connect specifically to the district they live in. There is a preference towards digital touchpoints for younger generations, a lack of activities for that group, and centralized activities that cause less diffusion into suburbs and local neighbourhoods. Local culture was found to disconnect people from the stories of their own area.
These findings shaped the entire design direction of Untold.
Personas
Early prototyping and testing
The Experience
How everything unfolds
The app guides users toward nearby story locations through a map or list view. Arriving at a location, the app prompts a scan. After scanning the AR spot, the story begins to reveal itself through augmented reality on the screen. A glitch transition signals the shift from the everyday city to the hidden one. AR characters appear and the story plays out in the real environment around the user.
Each discovered story unlocks badges and vanity items. Partnerships with businesses near each location also reward users with vouchers, creating a connection between cultural discovery and the local neighbourhood economy.
Customer journey map
Service blueprint
Outcomes
The prototype was built in Adobe Aero and tested in real Milan locations, with real AR models placed at the actual story sites. In-person user testing validated the core experience.
The project was later recognised by DesignRush as one of the best technology app designs.
System map
A working prototype with AR storytelling in Milan
Why this matters?
Untold was a direct exploration of how a digital layer can change the way someone experiences a physical space. The design challenge was not about the screen in isolation but about the relationship between what the screen shows and the real environment it sits inside.
That question has shaped how I approach spatial UX ever since, and it is what draws me to the intersection of AI, computer vision, and real-world environments in product design today.