AR Creativity and Human-Centered Design: Seeing Another Side of Hualien Through Students’ Eyes
On November 22, 2025, National Hualien Commercial High School and Jing-Yeu International Ltd. held a workshop bringing together technology, humanities and creativity: “AR Creativity and Human-Centered Design”. Students and teachers from the Hualien area joined the workshop to explore technology as a medium for expressing feelings, conveying emotions and recording local culture, rather than merely a set of functions on a screen. Hualien’s coast, mountains and night markets, along with familiar street corners and campus spaces, became important elements in their stories. Beyond introducing the three reality technologies—AR, VR and MR—the workshop placed storytelling at the heart of education, helping students rediscover Hualien through their own eyes.
Beginning with AR, VR and MR: Where Technology Meets Everyday Life
The course opened with an introduction to AR, VR and MR. The aim was to reveal technology’s presence in everyday life, rather than have students memorize terminology.
VR is a ticket to another world: From 360° virtual travel and immersive games to engineering simulations, it gives users a sense of being there.
AR adds a layer of meaning to reality: Pointing a phone camera at a street corner, coastline or small shop can reveal text, video or 3D models.
MR allows virtual and physical elements to interact: Virtual objects can be placed in real spaces and manipulated in more sophisticated ways.
More importantly:These technologies are accessible media for telling stories about life more effectively.
Stories Come First: The Spirit of AR Storytelling
Each student received an assignment: an AR worksheet.
Rather than simply filling in information, students were guided to consider:
What is Hualien like through my eyes?
Which places matter to me?
What do I want others to see through AR?
How should the story develop from one image to the next?
The worksheet had four main fields:
Trigger image(for example, Qixingtan, a night market, a street corner, a ferry service or a railway platform)
Scene description(What happened, and why does it matter?)
Interaction method(video, image replacement, 2.5D background removal, questions, links and more)
Story connection(What development will the next image bring?)
As students wrote, they gradually realized:Stories grow out of personal experience and emotion.
Hualien in the Worksheets: Memorable Moments
The worksheets portrayed Hualien from strikingly different perspectives, bringing many surprises to the session. Some were humorous, some focused on culture and others expressed social concern. Three students’ stories particularly impressed the instructor.
The first began on a platform at Hualien Station. The student described arriving with luggage in hand and feeling resistant: “I really don’t want to be in Hualien. Everything is unfamiliar.” In a taxi after leaving the station, streetlights passed the window as the empty streets made the place seem hollow. At the hotel, the student kept telling friends how boring Hualien was and wondered why anyone had brought them there. Yet the bustle, crowds and aromas of Dongdamen Night Market gradually softened that impression. At the entrance to Dayu Street, the student began to recognize that their assumptions had been too hasty. One morning on Hualien Bridge, watching early light on the river and feeling the breeze, the student suddenly saw Hualien as a place full of stories, with a distinctive rhythm worth exploring, rather than a remote area with nothing to offer.
The second student began with the overflow of a landslide-dammed lake in Guangfu, expressing strong social concern. The worksheet contrasted the peaceful mountain forest before the overflow with the mud-covered villages afterward. It then described a father’s call for people to go to Guangfu to “play in the mud,” bringing together volunteers known as the “Shovel Heroes.” Images, videos and AR effects conveyed the activity, warmth and solidarity of disaster relief. The story ended with the volunteers departing from Guangfu’s railway platform, where residents’ heartfelt thanks became particularly moving through AR.
The third student focused on an Amis child growing up. The story moved from listening to grandparents sing in a community gathering place to shamanic rituals, a traditional coming-of-age ceremony, a seaside canoe ceremony and the present-day Amis cultural center. Image replacement and cut-out 2.5D figures made cultural transmission vivid, showing Indigenous culture as emotion and memory lived in daily life rather than a static display.
Although their creative styles differed, all three turned Hualien into a story that could be seen and felt. AR brought those stories to life.
Hands-On Practice: Placing Stories in the Real World with ARshare
In the afternoon, participants used ARshare to build their stories.
Each trigger image represented a section of the story. As they configured content, students discovered:
Image framing affects a story’s atmosphere
Adding words to a photograph can change its emotional effect
Video and sound make a scene more vivid
Interactive questions let viewers participate in the story
Cut-out 2.5D characters give scenes a game-like quality
Image replacement can show contrasts between past and present
Everyone focused on their own Hualien story, and ARshare helped students experience that
technology is about creating as well as operating.
Presenting the Results: Sharing Stories with Others
The workshop ended with the moment everyone had anticipated:AR story presentations.
Students took turns introducing their work in 2–3 minutes. Teachers and classmates listened while scanning the trigger images on the screen with their phones. The resulting visuals, interactions and text made each creator’s story visible.
Some works were humorous, others artistic or filled with mysterious puzzles, while some resembled the earlier student’s work—
using railway platforms, streets and the coast to share an inner story.
At that moment, AR became a way for students to express themselves digitally for the first time.
Interdisciplinary Applications: AR Industries and Examples
Although this workshop focused on students’ Hualien stories, their work also revealed AR’s considerable potential in the wider world. Beyond classroom creativity, AR has become an important medium for improving experiences, strengthening brands and refining processes across industries.
The activity helped students begin to understand that the story-design skills they practiced are relevant to future work in many fields. The following industries and examples illustrate AR’s role:
🗺️ 1. Tourism and Local Culture
The Hualien stories are a useful starting point. Many cities use AR for local tours, cultural narratives and immersive tourism:
AR tours at Anping Old Fort in Tainan: Visitors scan historic sites to see animations reconstructing the old town and deepen their understanding of history.
AR underwater tours in Okinawa, Japan: Visitors on land can view three-dimensional marine ecosystems on their phones.
If Hualien adopts AR in the future, students’ stories could become:
An interactive story point about “the wind at Qixingtan”
A documentary point about “Guangfu’s Shovel Heroes”
Local tour material about “the pulse of Indigenous community culture”
Travel could reveal stories as well as scenery.
🖼️ 2. Cultural and Creative Work and Exhibitions: Stories Meet AR
Many exhibitions use AR to involve audiences in the work:
AR exhibitions at Kaohsiung’s Pier-2 Art Center: Works emerge from the walls, and visitors can interact with characters.
Japan’s teamLab primarily uses immersive projection, but has also combined it with AR to let visitors take works with them.
The AR story worksheets students created develop foundational skills for cultural content and interactive exhibitions.
🏫 3. Education and Educational Publishing: Making Knowledge Easier to Understand
Many publishers in Taiwan have begun using AR in interactive learning materials:
AR science textbooks: Scanning reveals volcanic eruptions or animated human organs.
AR English readers: Characters emerge from the pages to tell stories with children.
Students’ Hualien stories could also become textbook material combining local revitalization with education.
🛒 4. Retail and Marketing: Common Applications with Visible Results
Retailers use AR to let consumers try before they buy:
IKEA’s AR furniture placement: A phone shows how sofas and tables would look in the home.
Virtual makeup try-on: Examples include AR services from Sephora and MAC.
Tourism night-market branding: If Dongdamen Night Market introduced AR food tours, students could collaborate with vendors through their stories.
AR increases consumer involvement and can shorten decision-making time.
⛑️5. Engineering, Manufacturing and Safety Training: Widespread Business Use
This is a highly practical application area with substantial economic value:
Boeing uses AR to assist wiring assembly: Error rates are reduced by 90%.
Taipower’s AR maintenance training models: AR displays operating steps on site to reduce human error.
Building information modeling (BIM) combined with AR: Construction workers can see the locations of concealed pipes on site.
AR will be an important skill for students entering engineering.
🩺6. Healthcare and Rehabilitation: Supporting Treatment and Surgical Planning
Healthcare also uses AR to simulate high-risk tasks:
AR surgical navigation: Doctors can visualize organ locations from outside the skin to improve accuracy.
AR rehabilitation games: Patients complete hand and limb exercises through games.
Although students’ stories differ from medical work, combining information, narrative and interaction design is also central to developing medical AR.
AR Creativity and Human-Centered Design: Seeing Another Side of Hualien Through Students’ Eyes
By the end of the workshop, every participant had completed an AR story of their own.
These stories represented more than finished work:
Observations of daily life
Feelings about the local landscape and community
Reflection on personal emotions
A renewed understanding of Hualien
AR allowed students to place memories inside photographs, turn emotions into interactive content and revisit stories through technology.
During the AR Creativity and Human-Centered Design Workshop, Hualien became more than a city: it became a story in each student’s heart that others could scan, see and connect with.
#ARCreativityAndHumanCenteredDesign: Seeing Another Side of Hualien Through Students’ Eyes
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