Skip to content
The Mystery of Zwarte Jan

An interactive game experience in the Amsterdam Museum through an Augmented Reality app. Solve Zwart Jan’s death by interviewing other paintings come to life.

Assignment description: The Amsterdam Museum wants to enthuse secondary school students for a visit to the museum. Our assignment is to build a game or virtual experience that prepares the target group for a visit or arouses interest in the Panorama exhibition. Although the potential output is quite broad, it remains important that some form of education is incorporated.

End result: Zwarte Jan on the painting “The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Jan Deijman” by Rembrandt is the person, on the autopsy table, made available to the surgeons for an anatomy lesson. Commissioned by his partner, Elsje Otte, you find out how he ended up on this section table. Elsje communicates with you through letters, which often contain clues. These clues lead you through various other works in the exhibition that deal with aspects of Zwarte Jan’s life. These works come to life through Augmented Reality, which will tell you more about his life. Augmented Reality and a funny tone-of-voice are well suited to the target audience. Transferring ‘boring’ historical knowledge to our young target group is much better in an interactive and humorous way. Much laughter has accompanied the testing and demonstration of the game, which is exactly the emotion we want to arouse in our target audience.

Genomineerd door docent: Walter Giannuzzi.