Burroughs is an historical database of places in Lawrence, Kansas with a time-machine experience for the user dialing back exterior and interior views of city blocks, buildings, and businesses through the years, decades, and centuries, with building and business histories as well as public discussion walls tied to each physical location.
Feel free to peruse the issues and code. In a nutshell, we're building a database that can support entry of block, building, and business history, visual and other content, and location info.
The front end we are shooting for is both web presence for all platforms and a mobile web app. The database-driven effect is to be both an educational and research tool as well as a "time machine" experience where you look at a city block (typically one side of the street) or a specific historic building and, starting with the current facade, you can use a slider widget to dial back the time through the years and decades to the city's founding, watching the streets, sidewalks, vehicles, business signage, facades, and photo quality change in front of your eyes.
Further, you can stop at any time period and take a virtual tour. The technology for doing this is obviously a moving target so the idea is to have it decoupled as much as possible from the back end in order to take advantage of emerging technologies. For example, version 1.0 is likely to be a few interior photos of the building and/or historically vetted representative artwork along with historical text and a conversation pane for users to interact in and add info to - a conversation in a public sphere about the very location it is tied to, including the ubiquitous "what business was here before this one? I can't even remember now!" But three years from now, we hope to be able to present the user with an actual architectural walk-through experience. Who knows - maybe a hologram to wonder through in twenty years?
The GIS component for the mobile experience is envisioned as "fake AR" for now - no reason to waste resources or bandwidth on parsing building shapes but rather to read the lat/long and ideally the compass heading of the phone and use that info to select a few obvious candidates from the database and present those to the user as choices. It may or may not involve invoking the device's camera mode to present the illusion of real AR. It should be viewed primarily as simply extending the range of means for allowing the user to choose a block, building, or business to focus on (list search, birds-eye view map selection, geo-location).
The business component is about leveraging the database to find out the entire business and locational history of a given establishment, enterprise or service, since that information is already there in order to provide when dialing historic buildings back in time and seeing the businesses come and go.
Feel free to peruse the issues and code. In a nutshell, we're building a database that can support entry of block, building, and business history, visual and other content, and location info.
The front end we are shooting for is both web presence for all platforms and a mobile web app. The database-driven effect is to be both an educational and research tool as well as a "time machine" experience where you look at a city block (typically one side of the street) or a specific historic building and, starting with the current facade, you can use a slider widget to dial back the time through the years and decades to the city's founding, watching the streets, sidewalks, vehicles, business signage, facades, and photo quality change in front of your eyes.
Further, you can stop at any time period and take a virtual tour. The technology for doing this is obviously a moving target so the idea is to have it decoupled as much as possible from the back end in order to take advantage of emerging technologies. For example, version 1.0 is likely to be a few interior photos of the building and/or historically vetted representative artwork along with historical text and a conversation pane for users to interact in and add info to - a conversation in a public sphere about the very location it is tied to, including the ubiquitous "what business was here before this one? I can't even remember now!" But three years from now, we hope to be able to present the user with an actual architectural walk-through experience. Who knows - maybe a hologram to wonder through in twenty years?
The GIS component for the mobile experience is envisioned as "fake AR" for now - no reason to waste resources or bandwidth on parsing building shapes but rather to read the lat/long and ideally the compass heading of the phone and use that info to select a few obvious candidates from the database and present those to the user as choices. It may or may not involve invoking the device's camera mode to present the illusion of real AR. It should be viewed primarily as simply extending the range of means for allowing the user to choose a block, building, or business to focus on (list search, birds-eye view map selection, geo-location).
The business component is about leveraging the database to find out the entire business and locational history of a given establishment, enterprise or service, since that information is already there in order to provide when dialing historic buildings back in time and seeing the businesses come and go.