About

Hi, my name is Hoang and I am a Digital Scholarship Summer Fellow for Gettysburg College’s Musselman Library for Summer 2019. My project is about the Gettysburg College campus history from 1890s to 1920s. I am researching on how the campus has changed over time. In order to present the research, I will build an augmented reality mobile application.

What is augmented reality (AR)?

Augmented reality is an enhanced reality with a computer-generated image that is overlaid on the existing reality, showing digital information that is useful for the user.

What is my motivation for the project?

I was very interested in the history of Gettysburg and Gettysburg College. However, once I asked my friends about the history, they only knew about the Battlefield and nothing more about our College. So, I learned a bit about the history of Gettysburg College and I really wanted to share it with the College community. I wanted to show the history in an interesting and modern way, that’s how I came up with mobile augmented reality. Mostly everyone on our campus has a mobile phone, so the mobile application will be accessible for everyone on campus. AR is also an modern technology that can present history in a very interactive way.

How did I get the data?

I have learned a lot about the Gettysburg College history from many different sources. My research was mostly based on two literary works from Charles Henry Glatfelter: “Yonder beautiful and stately college edifice : a history of Pennsylvania Hall (Old Dorm)” and “A salutary influence : Gettysburg College, 1832-1985.”  I also have learned a lot from oral history based on stories of Ron Couchman and from historical photos from digital collections created by Special Collections and College Archives.

What programs did I use?

For my project I have used a 3D engine Unity and a Wikitude AR for Unity software. This allowed me to build a cross-platform mobile application for both Android and iOS. I also experimented with Vuforia and Mapbox, but I have not used them in my project.

Why have I not used them then?

I started trying out to start AR applications with Vuforia and it was very easy to make simple AR application with image recognition, but it was not possible to make 3D object recognition for large objects. Then I tried using ARFoundation, an AR software developed by Unity, but it also did not support object recognition for Android devices. So I thought instead of using 3D object recognition to track the campus building, I will try to geolocate the building using GPS. So, I found MapBox that was developing an AR software for Unity. Once, I tried using the world scale AR to locate the building, MapBox did not work correctly, it had inaccurate calibration so did not map properly the buildings and also the software was deprecated for Unity. So I also had to abandon MapBox. Then, I ended up using Wikitude because of their GPS-location function. However, I did not use it, because Wikitude had a better 3D object recognition, so I ended up using Wikitude.