Digitally Connecting the Past with the Present
For this project I selected two areas in the lobby of Memorial Hall, near the World War I Memorial. Neither of these included images, however, had anything to do with the memorial itself. The first thing I selected was not something that I had even considered as an option until I stepped into the building to try to complete this project. I was looking around the war memorial and I saw the plaques all around it and I was struck by how much history that Memorial Hall has, that no one seems to pay any attention to. As I looked around the lobby a little more, I noticed the diagram posted by the door. It is a diagram of the floor plans for the current layout of the building in case of emergencies, and people who come in and out of Memorial see that little thing so many times, and we process it and then almost forget it. It’s something we almost take for granted, because we simply assume that that is what Memorial looks like now and that it has always looked that way. I know I assumed that before beginning this project. So the first overlay I did was of one of the original building plan sketches for Memorial over this current floor plan, in the hopes that it would make people consider the history that Memorial has, even just in its architecture.
The second overlay followed a similar train of thought. When it was first built, Memorial looked so different from how it looks now, and that is an incredibly interesting fact that very few people actually know unless they make a point to seek that information out on their own. So, using the display stand for the memorial book as a base, I overlayed an image of what Memorial Hall used to look like over what the lobby looks like now, because from a vantage point in one of the hallways on either side of the lobby, you can almost see the building as though you are standing in it as it used to be back when Memorial served as the University’s library.
This project was really interesting for many reasons. Okay, sure, I’m not exactly the biggest fan of HP Reveal as a software, and in the future I will likely seek out alternatives to use, but the experience as a whole was rather enjoyable. I’ve always considered augmented reality as something out of my grasp, as something that requires too much expensive software and hardware, or that requires more coding experience than I have under my belt. But this project showed me that it isn’t so inaccessible. Augmented reality is right at my fingertips with the apps and other programs readily available on so many different platforms that I already use (my phone, computer, tablets, etc.). This sort of accessibility with software speaks volumes about the strides technology has made recently and will continue to make, to better the world. This project gave me a kind of perspective on history by making me look at Memorial’s past, and a perspective on the future, by making me consider augmented reality and other rapidly progressing technologies, and I actually had a better time than I ever could have expected.
