Technology & Systems / Interactive

Commissioned by the NEoN Digital Arts Festival in Dundee and supported by Creative Scotland, Bombaze was a mobile AR game that turned the city into a playground of AR discovery. The name, taken from 17th-century Scots poet Allan Ramsay’s word bombaze, meaning to bamboozle, mystify and confuse, set the tone perfectly for a mix of wonder, mischief, and tech-driven curiosity.

Players roamed Dundee’s hidden corners hunting for image-recognition tags that unlocked AR artworks through their mobile devices. Each find revealed a new layer of the city, blending provocations on virtual art with physical space and transforming everyday streets into portals of interaction and play.

Behind the scenes, the project pushed at the edges of locative media and AR development, built through collaborations with Scottish 3D design studio Once Were Farmers, together we tested what happens when technology stops being a screen-bound experience and starts to live inside the city itself.

Bombaze asked a simple but radical question, what if art could live outside the gallery, in the noise, movement, and texture of public life? What if augmented reality became a tool not for escape, but for connection? The project became a live experiment in re-imagining how we play, move, and make meaning in public space, turning confusion (bombaze) into discovery.