Collective History by Ethan Printz
Capstone 2022
An iOS-based platform for creating and viewing augmented reality walking tours that tell our collective urban history.
Description
Collective History is an iOS-based platform that enables anyone to tell personal or historic stories through cutting edge augmented reality walks. The app contains three primary components: the walk/place viewer, the creation editor, and the discovery section to find other users’ walks.
The viewer uses the latest GeoAnchor APIs to place content accurately amongst city streets within a couple of feet of precision. This content can be a combination of 3D models, photos, videos, spatial audio, or text.
The tour creation interface allows for these anchors to be created without any knowledge of programming or experience with game engines like Unity. It also has deep personalization options to allow for the tour user interface to match the thematic, aesthetic, or historical style of the story being told.
The discovery section aims to solve one of the primary issues with the current crop of historical augmented reality experiences: the difficulty in finding experiences that interest you. It shows you walks in neighborhoods near you, and categorizes experiences by historical veracity (fictional / historical fiction / personal story / unverified historical / verified historical)
Its expected full App Store release is in late summer, with limited beta releases over TestFlight in early summer.