ENHANCING RESEARCH AND EDUCATION ON URBAN HISTORY BY USING MOBILE TECHNOLOGY

Imagine you’re exploring the historic center of a city with its impressive town houses, churches and monuments. What if you could just use your mobile to find out about the historic buildings around you, with detailed visual information about how they were built and the story behind them, making history come alive before your eyes?

The new research group on four-dimensional research and communication of urban history (HistStadt4D) aims to investigate and develop methods and technologies to transfer extensive repositories of historical media and their contextual information into a three-dimensional spatial model, with an additional temporal component. This will make content accessible to different target groups, researchers and the public, via a 4D browser. A location-dependent augmented-reality representation can be used as an information base, research tool and to explore and gain historical knowledge. The resulting applications will enable the design of new augmented-reality and virtual learning environments to support education on urban history. The data resources available for this research include extensive holdings of historical photographs of Dresden, which have documented the urban development over the decades, and digitized map collections on the Deutsche Fotothek (German photographic collection) database. These will build the foundation for a prototype model which will give users a virtual experience of historic parts of Dresden.

The main objective of research is to investigate educational approaches to interact with media repositories in the urban space and what it means for user guidance and knowledge transfer. The findings of different research fields (e.g. Media Pedagogy, Learning Psychology, Technology Acceptance Research, Media Research, Information and Communication Technology, Tourism) and the development of the 4D browser will lead to the design of a specific learning environment for mobile devices. A prototype of an augmented reality application, showing historic parts of Dresden, will give the opportunity to investigate tourist behavior and the acceptance of new technology. Their responses to the mobile augmented reality application can give a deep insight of their motivation and needs as well as their learning success. The research will help to design user centered augmented reality applications for tourism to expand the experience and to transfer knowledge.