An Augmented Reality audio book lets you see into the past

Who lived and worked here? What where they up to? Why did a fire burn everything to the ground? The AR audio book tells the story of the buildings by augmenting several connected scenes right where they have taken place.

Spatial anchors allow for a 1:1 overlay of the remaining ruins and their virtually resurrected historical counterparts.

A minimalistic user interface lets the content be the hero.

Light, fire and smoke effects invigurate the scenes.

Once scanned, the app knows about the position and orientation on site and intuitively leads the way.

What will we leave behind?

Archeological finds.

A clean white object table exposes the modern versions of the findings, allowing visitors to instinctively relate to their meanings.

All archeological pieces are explained in depth in a dynamic user interface, giving insight in history, context and location.

Then and now

The buildings in context of the roman empire.

The abstract floorplan of the remaining ruins triggers a virtual overlay. Users can toggle between a bird’s eye view of the remains and a reconstruction of the site as it might have looked like before the fire. Signposts on the horizontal line indicate important cities alongside historic travel distances.

behind the scenes

The app is build with Unity for iOS and Android. We took several approaches to find the right AR framework and finally landed on Microsoft Azure Spatial Anchors and AR Foundation.