Having worked in libraries for more than 25 years, one of the things I have grown ever-more passionate about promoting unique collections and getting resources out “into the wild.” Augmented reality offers a very real way of getting resources into the hands and eyes of anyone with a smartphone or tablet.
When selecting the subject for my project, I wanted to keep the project geographically local, and to draw material from the UVic Libraries Archives. What I settled on was to highlight the donors and benefactors whose names grace campus buildings, auditoriums, and other landmarks. This has the additional benefit of promoting donor relations (and potentially making the administration happy!)
This course used three key tools: Layar, PorPOISe, and Drupal. As happens in tech, we discovered that through recent updates to the interface, Layar has pushed geolocated AR into a corner in favour of promoting image-based AR. This led to more than a few technical issues including our projects not working on iOS devices (in a room full of Apple tech, this was pretty close to a deal-breaker). However, I also packed along an Android tablet so I could test it in a limited way (my tablet has a very weak compass so testing was challenging).
I input a dozen points of interest and it was really exciting to see all the points pop up on the Layar test interface.
It’s always fun for me to dig through the Archives (I focused my search in the UVic Archives’ Historical Photograph Collection) and to research local history, so I did spend some time digging. However, I also spent a lot of time trying to find workarounds for the technical problems. Another student took the time to test the POIs using an alternative to PorPOISe, Hoppala and found that her Layer then worked. Knowing this, my next step will be testing my project in the same way.
The methods I chose were purposely simple because my goal was to have something that worked and could be demonstrated by the end of the course. While there is the chance to use 3D objects and animations, I felt the need to be modest in my exploration.
I can easily see augmented reality being used as a powerful outreach tool both for collection promotion and also fundraising efforts. I will be approaching the administration about making this project fully realized and released.