Author:	Huber, Dominik; Stieglbauer, Felix
Supervisor:	Prof. Gudrun Klinker
Advisor:	Plecher, David (@ne23mux)
Submission Date:	30.09.2022

Abstract

This lab-course explored the practical development and deployment of interactive applications, serious games, and augmented reality (AR) with the goal to raise awareness and teach about historical events, locations and buildings. This involved multiple projects, some of which were already in an advanced stage of development at the beginning of this lab-course. An example is the StolpersteineAR application, telling about the lives of holocaust victims, which has been developed in past research projects and was further improved by us based on additional user feedback. Expanding on the history of the Jewish people in Germany, we also developed an interactive map which allows historians to add important locations and information, and connect them based on historical data. This map along with its historical references can then be viewed by interested people. Apart from this, we worked on an interactive AR application, augmenting different components of a historical altar and making additional information, for example about inscriptions, available. Both an on-site and off-site (non-AR) version of this application is available.

Projects

St. Martin's Church Landshut - Altar

In order to illustrate the history of the almost 600 years old main altar of the St. Martin's Church in Landshut, we developed two applications:

One is developed for web-based interaction with a 3D model of the altar. It supposed to give users the opportunity to visualize the altar and some of its historical details from home.

The second application is a mobile AR application, which was designed to track the altar's 3D structure in reality and augment important overlays over it. For easier testing and development, we printed a custom 3D model of the altar, with which the tracking works, as long as the size difference is accounted for.

StolpersteineAR

The StolpersteineAR project has already been in development for several semesters. However, as we received additional user feedback from people testing the application, we attempted to address the corresponding issues and improve the user experience. One of those simple improvements is a loading bar, which we deemed necessary for the time the software takes to register a "Stolperstein".

Interactive Map Jewish Munich

Lastly, we developed an interactive map, showing places in Munich which played an important role in Jewish history. Especially, a functional backend interface for historians to be able to add entries and data on their own was in the focus of this project.