AUGMENTING THE MUSEUM: 2 AUGMENTED REALITY APPS

TECHNOLOGY TUESDAYS

BY: NATANIA SHERMAN

A view through Museum of London's Street Museum App (Source)

Happy Tuesday! Like most museum frequenters, I often wish that the objects in museums could come to life. Wouldn't it be nice to actually experience what it felt like to live in the past? Well today's article is all about Augmented Reality (AR) and will highlight a few museum apps that use this technology to enhance their artifacts, interpretation and even the cities they live in to help give visitors a view of the past.

1. The Museum of London's Street Museum App is a mobile phone application that uses GPS technology and augmented reality to overlay historical photographs of London over views of the city in real time. The application includes a map highlighting sites that feature augmented reality, so that users can take a tour through London's past and experience all of the sites, usually tourist destinations, that are tagged with historic photographs. Additionally while many users may delight in the juxtaposition of past and present, those with an interest in the history have access to information about the photograph's context and the history of the tagged site. This groundbreaking mobile app has resulted in some amazing images of London and is notable in that it extends the Museum of London's interpretation beyond it's walls and into the city itself.

2. The Royal Ontario Museum's (ROM's) Ultimate Dinosaurs: Giants of Gondwana exhibition was one of the museum's more well-known forays into the field of AR. In this case, the technology was used not to bring a city to life rather to help visitors experience dinosaurs as they were when the Earth had only two continents. In the Ultimate Dinosaurs exhibition from 2012, iPads supplied by the museum allowed visitors to bring the terrifying Giganotosaurus to life by overlaying a rendering of what the gigantic dino would have looked like while alive over the skeleton in the exhibition. As well, there were information hotspots scattered throughout the exhibition to add more layers of information.

I hope this article sheds some light on just a few of the exciting possibilities of augmented reality.