SMARTinez Tech
Fed up with years of abuse and oppression, the LGBTQ community fought back after a police raid. RYOT has creatively reimagined the events that took place in June 1969.
When the NYPD barged into the Stonewall Inn arresting LGBTQ patrons on June 28, 1969, they did not expect the community to fight back. But fed up with years of abuse and oppression, that’s exactly what the community did ― rioting and occupying the streets into the early morning hours.
Today, 50 years later, RYOT creatively reimagines a scene in front of the Stonewall Inn on that fateful night in full augmented reality. The team built a digital Stonewall Inn, complete with five different characters who share their stories, culled from decades’ worth of interviews. As users walk around the space and tap on each “play” icon, they’ll hear the various stories and perspectives from those who were there. These historical figures include Sylvia Rivera, Raymond Castro, Yvonne Ritter, Lucian K. Truscott IV, and Deputy Inspector Seymour Pine.
Using a combination of photogrammetry, audio interviews, and creative 3D modeling, the experience freezes a specific moment in time during the riot, allowing users to walk through the actual group of people and hear what each one of them have to say.
The models were textured with images of newspaper articles from the original riot.
The Stonewall Inn Riot was distributed on iOS using the AR SDK (later rebranded to Immersive SDK)
AR SDK is a product I built for iOS on top of ARKit designed to provide robust AR experiences with features such as sound playback, object carousels, theming and branding, simplified call-to-action (CTA) implementation, custom shaders, object selection and interactivity, and so much more.
The Stonewall Inn experience utilized much of these capabilities. It showcased the real-world scaling abilities, multi-channel audio playback and cueing features, object billboarding, among others.
