Yuanmingyuan Park — Beijing's Old Summer Palace — was destroyed by invading forces in 1860. Ten million visitors a year walk its paths. In 2024, we launched Chrono Craft: 20 custom-built augmented reality buses that transform the park into a shared, immersive theater.

Each bus seats 20 passengers. Three transparent TOLED screens overlay digital scenes onto the real park outside — imperial palaces rising from ruins, royal barges crossing the lake. A 12-speaker array with dual subwoofers delivers 3D spatial audio. LED lighting shifts to match the narrative mood. Everything is triggered by the bus's GPS position, not a timeline — content adapts to the vehicle's actual movement through the park.

We built the platform from scratch: hardware sourcing and integration, a custom media engine for position-based content playback, authoring tools for designers to place cues along the route, and adaptive bridge content that fills gaps when traffic slows the ride. Software and audio development took six months, with three more for debugging. Story and content spanned nine months. The fleet runs on hydrogen power and operates 20+ runs per day per bus.

The result is a shared experience — no headsets, no isolation. Passengers gasp together, laugh together, and leave together. The technology amplifies the real world instead of replacing it.