CHAR: Cultural Heritage Augmented Reality Apps (2020)
Curator: Liron Efrat | University of Toronto | 2020
Collection Editor: Isabel Pedersen
Collection Archivist: Sharon Caldwell
Augmented Reality can facilitate diverse relationships between digital data and material environments, providing rich insights in cultural heritage and museum settings. This collection groups over 65 cultural heritage Augmented Reality (AR) apps, including ones for museums, art projects, activism, and archeological and heritage sites. In one example, The Sanhadrin Trailapp accompanies the 70K, recently excavated trail, which connects several archeological sites of Jewish settlements from the 2nd Century BC at the Galil area in Northern Israel. Through the app's interface, hikers gain access to digital models of archeological reconstructions of the sites and learn about the natural environment of the area. In another example, Ghosts of the Horseshoe app exposes the hidden history of South Carolina University as it unveils the slave labour that was employed to build the university campus. Users of Ghosts can listen to recorded testimonials and gain access to many archival materials documenting the campus’ construction while navigating the site.
In this collection I identify 12 new categories of AR in cultural heritage settings, and I use them to classify the projects. These AR categories are indicative of 12 ways to (re)construct the user experience of cultural heritage content and sites, and they are divided into two sets. The first set includes projects that use AR to animate and diversify the interpretations of history and heritage. Categories of the first set are: Historical Annotation; Revival of Past; Repressed Past; Counterfactual Histories; Future Potentialities; Historical Modelling and Reconstruction. The second set includes projects that use AR to expand visitors’ interpretation of heritage or museum sites as geographical or architectural locations. Categories of the second set are: Opening Space; Deconstructing Spaces; Controlled Space; Display Objects; Locational Convergence; Compositional Convergence. The AR category for each project will be briefly explained under the project’s description and would also appear as a keyword. To see all projects under a certain category, click on the category name in the keywords section, or use the search box.
To read more about these categories and related AR practices:
Liron Efrat. REALational Perspectives: Expanding Beyond the Here-and-Now in Mobile Augmented Reality (AR) Art, Leonardo, Vol. 53.4 (2020), 374-379. Liron Efrat. Historical APPistemoloy: The Mapping of the Expanded Field of Cultural Heritage AR Apps as a Creative Tool. International Journal of Digital Art History (6). Forthcoming 2021. Liron Efrat and Brittany Myburgh. Seeing is Sensing: Three Strategies for Multisensory Experience in Mixed Reality Art, ISEA conference proceedings 2020.