2018
This 360° video project for the Oculus Go was about making history feel more real by combining historic events with the locations as they are now.
A test we did to see how our idea could look like.
In the picture you see the “Rathausgasse” leading to the Townhall in St. Pölten. The overlay is a picture taken in 1903.
Since St. Pölten has a long and interesting history, we wanted to give people the possibility to dive into the past more deeply. Our idea was that historic events feel more real if you see them in perspective to today’s locations.We did this by combining really old imagery with contemporary 360° images of exactly the place where the picture has been captured in the past. St. Pöltens archives possess a huge amount of historic images, some of those capturing the visit of emperor Franz Joseph II. in 1910 or Hitler visiting the “Adolf-Hitler-platz” which was the name of the Townhall Square between 1938 and 1946.
We mostly used St. Pölten’s Topothek for image scouting as it also features the exact locations of where the images where captured. Which help us a lot in the image selection process. As there were so many interesting images to find, we decided to focus on the Townhall Square first and still have the possibility to add more images later.
The app allows users to adjust the opacity of the old imagery, so that they can compare how everything looked back then vs. now.
Furthermore, they can choose a year on a timeline to see different events in history. Upon selection, the user will be transported to the location where the image from that year was shot. The app was made with Unity to run on Oculus Quest.
The main challenge was combining the old images with the 360° images from today.
We wanted the old images to blend in perfectly, so we had so get the camera’s location, height and angle exactly right – meaning we had to stand at the exact same point as the photographer did back then.
When taking pictures, photographers often stand with their back against a wall. We tried to find images of locations where the photographers did not have a wall in their back, because these pictures would not look good when shot with a 360° camera, since half of the 360° panorama would just be a blank wall.
Team:
Johannes Ambrosch, Huang Chen,
Samuel Kreuz, Alisa Feldhofer