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Rose

Walking Through History Using AR

Overview

As a Black-owned business, we wanted to use our skills and expertise to build an experience that highlights parts of the vast impact of the Civil Rights Movement for Black History Month. In this experience, users can take a walk through history, learning about major events leading up to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. This augmented reality experience focuses around walking along the Edmund Pettus Bridge, a site of many civil rights marches, including the march from Selma to Montgomery.

Try It For Yourself

Client

ROSE Research and Development

Industry

Education

Release

2020

Services

Try It For Yourself
Technology like augmented reality comes with infinite opportunities to shape our tomorrow, but it can and should also be used as a window for us to examine our pasts. With the ability to see, hear, and explore elements of the past as if they were in the reality of the here and now, we have a better way of learning about what has come before.
Eric Liang

Eric Liang

Front End/AR Engineer, ROSE

Why Use Augmented Reality?

Harnessing augmented reality allows for a realistic and immersive experience that anyone with a smartphone can take part in. Using Apple’s latest Reality Composer and ARKit technology, users can walk through the bridge and examine its architecture, while, at the same time, engaging with historically significant media and information regarding the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.

This experience exemplifies a model for using augmented reality for educational material. These kinds of experiences can be used in museums, classrooms, and historical sites to create memorable and moving learning opportunities.

Education Through Immersion

Making this experience as immersive as possible required careful design and development decisions around scale and placement. This AR experience allows users to walk across and through the model, versus the model itself moving. Allowing users to walk across a digital recreation of the bridge provides users with a sense of not only physical scale, but emotional scale, as someone walks the same path as the protestors. Taking advantage of the user’s position within the augmented reality landscape, this experience uses positional triggers to reveal historical photos and relevant information as the user moves across the bridge.

Experience It Yourself