Augmented Reality and Heritage

Somehow the Heritage Jam run by the University of York has come round around again and gone. As I outlined in this post the Heritage Jam is an opportunity for people to get together and create new heritage visualisations relating to a specific theme. The theme this year was ‘Bones of Our Past’ – as I couldn’t be there in person, I decided to go ahead and put something together for the online competition.

It turns out my entry won first place! I built something that I have wanted to experiment with for a quite a while – an Augmented Reality application that allows you to take a real artefact (in this case a bone) and compare it to a virtual reference collection. By using your phone you can augment a ‘virtual lab’ onto your kitchen table and then use the app to call up a number of different bones from different animals until you can find one that matches.

The AR aspect of it adds something more to the ‘normal’ online virtual reference collections – by allowing you to augment the models in the correct scale in front of you and then twist and turn each one side by side.

In addition, as I am interested in multi-sensory things, I also added in the sounds and smells of the animals – as well as a virtual portal into a 360 degree video of a deer herd in action.

Finally, it has a link through to a set of Open Data from Open Context showing where else in the world similar types of bones have been found.

You can watch the visualisation here:

Please check out the full visualisation and explanation here: http://www.heritagejam.org/new-blog/2017/10/27/the-artefactkit-stu-eve

As with all of these ‘jam’ projects, the app is just a prototype and is quite messy in terms of overall look and feel – but I think it has potential to be quite useful. Now I just need some funding!

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