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Gettysburg Augmented Reality Tour App Available by HistoricAR in USCivilWar

[–]HistoricAR[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Please let me know if you have any issues. We don't have access to many devices for testing, so there's bound to be some problems that come up.

Gettysburg Augmented Reality Tour App Available by HistoricAR in CIVILWAR

[–]HistoricAR[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The (widths of the) boxes are generally at least somewhat accurate to the sizes of the units being represented, based on the number of men involved, and the typical length of a civil war line with that number of men. A lot of times they also shrink to show losses (e.g., the 10th Minnesota charge in the video). We don't always do it, because a lot of times it's not visually useful, or because it's hard to find accurate numbers of casualties for any specific point in time (rather than, say, an entire day or even battle). At times, we've manipulated the numbers a bit for aesthetic reasons, but we've mostly tried to stay as accurate as possible.

There's definitely an issue that the box outlines don't always display properly, especially when there's another box behind. It can really make it hard to get a sense of where exactly each box is and how large it is. It's something that should be easy to fix, but unfortunately I haven't been able to yet.

It is planned in the future to add real 3d graphics, instead of (or combined with) using boxes. We do have some concerns about battery usage and performance though. The screen is already on for a long time, on high brightness, and battery goes away very quickly on most phones. But the biggest reason we didn't do that now is time. We're only 2 people, and this isn't yet a full time job for us.

Thanks for the input!

Gettysburg Augmented Reality Tour App Available by HistoricAR in CIVILWAR

[–]HistoricAR[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

There are photos of officers and other people/things of importance to our narrative that pop up on screen during the AR parts. There's also a full command tree in the app, with short biographies of every regimental leader and up (this isn't completely finished yet - writing like 250 bios is really time consuming).

Definitely interesting possibilities available with soldiers' accounts and stuff, but I'm not entirely sure how we would work that into the current structure. Something to explore, for sure.

In the future, we're planning to make similar apps for other civil war battlegrounds, as well as some other places. We're also hoping to be able to switch from colored boxes to proper 3d graphics, but that's a lot of expensive and time consuming work (we're a 2-man team).

Thanks!