The app that aims to "merge the present with the past"
Museums offer their visitors a "taste" of the past, however static representations are often not enough to convey a complete picture of what life might have been like in ancient times.
This original application and hardware were developed by Dr Stuart Eve, Honorary Research Fellow at the Institute of Archaeology at UCL University College London.
The Dead Men's Eye app uses an iPad's GPS to pinpoint the user's location. Once the user holds the iPad in a position so that the camera is pointing toward the horizon, virtual representations "take their place" in place of the real images. These representations move and change in real time as the user moves through the surrounding space.
As reported by MailOnline, the application uses a mix of Unity3D gaming engine and Vuforia augmented reality technology to place the virtual representations - which are based on archaeological data - in the correct position and perspective, depending on the user's location.
"Augmented reality gives us the opportunity to take a few glimpses into the past, which we could not experience simply by visiting an archaeological site or walking through a neighborhood of a city or in a field in the middle of nowhere," he explained to the British newspaper.
"These 'experiences' can easily be reproduced within a virtual reality environment," the researcher added, but he stressed that "by creating an entire experience within computers, using special glasses or other equipment, we risk being completely cut off from the real world and creating computer-connected 'zombies' who, instead of living in the real world, 'live' in a virtual world, interacting through computers.".
