HP Reveal (or not)
For my two overlays I tried to capture the more historical parts of Memorial that many people walk past every day and might want to know more about. For my first overlay I tried to match the archived photo of the Book of the Dead to actual Book of the Dead that is still in Memorial Hall today. For the rest of my vision, I pictured the overlay to be able to also include information about the Book of the Dead, such that it is one of the only remaining remnants from the initial Memorial library, but HP reveal could not handle text along with the overlay.
It made sense to me thinking about how much extra work the app would have to do to incorporate text while also letting the user see the archived photo, but I was thinking of my overlay as something I would love to see as a museum or an archived site and the capacity of the app was a bit disappointing in that regard. I felt as though it would have added to the charm and usefulness of the app if the user could learn more about something while also interacting with the primary source that is overlaid on her screen.
Despite these limitations I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to make my archived picture line up with the Book of the Dead to create a feeling that the user was walking back in time to see Old Memorial Library. I think that when the object was stagnant, easily recognizable, and close to the photographer, the app worked incredibly well especially for something as new and difficult to work with as augmented reality.
For my second overlay, the problems with HP reveal’s system were much more apparent. I tried to do an overlay of the Kissing Arches on the east side of Memorial because there was an archived photo of that set of arches in our Dropbox. What was difficult about this overlay was when I tried to take a picture of the arches, I had to make sure that my camera was pointed at a pretty much straight angel. I could not tilt the camera upwards and have the camera allow me to take a good picture. That was frustrating because it wasn’t natural for me to hold my camera in that fashion, so I imagine if a user was walking and using the app, they would tilt their camera naturally in a similar way I did.
What’s worse is that when I tried to see my own overlay from the EXACT same spot that I had just created it from, the app struggled to find the overlay from such a far distance. The technology is very specific because it is memorizing photographs, so if the photo that was taken was in an outdoor or more natural setting, chances are there is something in the world like a squirrel or falling leaves, that won’t be in every picture and would make seeing the overlay from that position hard.
Overall, I did enjoy using the app to try to match up history with the present, and when the app did work it worked very well. I see a bright future for augmented and virtual reality and I hope companies like Hp try to explore the capabilities of AR further because if something that was as limited and broken as Hp reveal could still be fun for me, then there is serious entertainment and education potential for AR.
