Tag Archives: PhillyHistory

Sep 12, 2011

Tyreek Elam’s Account of His Summer Internship with Azavea

By Robert Cheetham

Project H.O.M.E‘s mission is to empower people to break the cycle of homelessness.  As part of their numerous educational and professional development programs is the John and Sheila Connors Youth Employment Program.  Every summer, along with offering academic workshops and professional development classes, Project H.O.M.E places students into local businesses and city agencies for six-week, 20-hour per week internships.  At these positions, students are exposed to business practices and professional activities they might not have otherwise.  It is in this context that Azavea welcomed Tyreek Elam into our Philadelphia office this summer.

Why?  One of our core principles is to do work that is meaningful and encourages positive changes in the communities our clients serve.  Welcoming Tyreek amongst us seemed like a tangible and meaningful, albeit small, way to make a positive impact in the life of someone from our community.  During one of our Management Team meetings, I presented the idea and we all voted unanimously that Tyreek should join us for his internship.  This is his account of his stay with us.  It is my hope Tyreek will remain in touch with us.  We all wish him the best as he prepares to apply to college and develops his professional career.

“Though I was only here for six weeks, these six weeks were some of the most wonderful six weeks, I have had in my entire life.  My internship with Azavea was amazing, everyone in the office was kind, helping, and just plain, awesome.  I have never seen a place so vibrant, everyone is almost always busy working with something but when you go and ask them something there is never a bad atmosphere about them.  Each week I was assigned a different team and a different assignment, and as a result more insight on what Azavea had to offer.

The first week I worked with the Law Enforcement team, consisting of Bennet, Jeremy, and Kenny, as a beta tester, using a demo of their HunchLab product to find any problems or bugs in the software.  I greatly enjoyed the application as well as the way they explained things to me.  HunchLab is a web-based geographic crime visualization, early warning, and risk forecasting software.  HunchLab and the team developing it were so great that at the end of the week I reluctantly had to go.

But the fun did not stop there, the next week was the Cicero team, with Abby, Andrew, and Daniel.  During my week with Cicero, which is an address-based legislative district matching and elected official look up web API, I gathered and entered data about previous elections for various countries.  That was definitely a challenge, an interesting challenge, considering how little is known about a lot of old elections for a lot of countries.

The next week I was placed with the PhillyHistory / Sajara team, which consists of Deborah and Carissa.  PhillyHistory.org offers a geographic search, mapping and display of historic assets in Philadelphia.  This was also one of my favorite weeks because I really enjoyed surfing through all the historic photos they had of the city I live in.  The entire week was spent with me going through the pictures and recording data, but the pictures I saw made me feel closer to Philadelphia.

The next week I worked with the DecisionTree team helping them install Ubuntu, which was awesome and gave me a feel for Ubuntu and an OS other than the Windows or Mac OS X.   I really enjoyed how Tamara,  Josh and Erik, let me get a feel for the software and the OS on my own but were there to help me when I stumbled or, was stuck.

My last week, I was with the Land Records team and worked on their PWD Stormwater Billing Application.  Though I knew very little about the application it was still fun.  I was assigned with the task to find ways to break or hack the web app so they could fix it.  Matthew and Justin were extremely helpful when it came to parts of software that I found that did not work or had some bugs.

Overall my time here at Azavea was a great one and I wish I could do it again.  Everyone was approachable and reasonable, but I would like to personally thank Ms. Rachel, because my stay there was twice as wonderful because of her.  She always made sure I had what I needed, if I needed more of anything, if I was making out okay, and if there was ever anything that she herself could not help me with she tried hard to find someone that could.” – Tyreek Elam

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Mar 07, 2011

Augmented Reality Update: Selecting Images

By Deb Boyer

How do you choose 500 photos out of 93,000? And then how do you whittle down those 500 images to a mere 20? That was the conundrum the PhillyHistory.org team faced as they began the process of selecting images for the PhillyHistory.org augmented reality application. While the application will include the majority of the geocoded images found in PhillyHistory.org, we’ve also selected 500 images for a bit of special attention. Those 500 will be “pinned” or more accurately located in 3-D space so that the historic image appears to align with the current landscape. Out of those 500, we also selected twenty images for which we provided extended, researched descriptions.

To read more about the photo selection process, check out the following entries on the PhillyHistory.org blog.

Something New in Your Neighborhood: Augmented Reality

Selecting Images for Augmented Reality

And in case you’re curious what all of this might look like….

Memorial Hall in 1876 and 2010

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Feb 08, 2011

Augmented Reality in Cultural Institutions

By Deb Boyer

If you visit Azavea these days, there’s a good possibility you might notice people wandering around near the windows holding up their smartphones or bundling up to head outside and test the new mobile augmented reality (AR) application for PhillyHistory.org. Erik and Josh, the developers working on the prototype application, are hard at work researching and experimenting with the best ways to combine historic photographs and mobile technology to create a great AR experience.

The Philadelphia Department of Records, however, is certainly not the first cultural institution to investigate the use of augmented reality as an educational and access tool. Within the last three years, several interesting projects around the world have provided new and innovative ways for the public to view the collections of various museums and cultural organizations. While you’re waiting for the PhillyHistory.org AR app, you may want to check out some of these great augmented reality applications. Some of the projects require you to be in a specific location, but others can be accessed anywhere.

Augmented Reality for Interpretive and Experiential Learning (ARIEL), Philadelphia – A group of organizations working on “fixed-station exhibit devices with augmented and virtual reality interfaces.”

Augsburg Display Cabinet, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles - Using a printed marker and a web cam, users can manipulate and more closely view a digital model of the cabinet.

Berlin Wall, Berlin –  A layer in Layar that enables users to view a recreation of the Berlin Wall.

Gene Becker and Adriano Farano, San Francisco - Experimenting with historic photographs and augmented reality in San Francisco.

Powerhouse Museum, Sydney - Enables users to view historic photographs of Sydney, Australia.

Streetmuseum, Museum of London, London – Historic photographs of London available as overlays on the current landscape.

The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh – View information and images of locations in Pittsburgh and New York connected to Warhol’s life and work.

Urban Augmented Reality (UAR), Netherlands Architecture Institute, Rotterdam - An architecture focused application that provides images of past buildings, designs that were never built, and artist’s impressions of the future built environment.

With the rapid pace of AR development, I’m sure that I’ve missed a few projects. Leave a comment if you know of other great AR work going on in cultural institutions!

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Feb 01, 2011

An NEH Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant to Enable PhillyHistory.org to Experiment with Augmented Reality

By Rachel Cheetham-Richard

We’ve been announcing loud and clear that we are adding augmented reality capabilities to PhillyHistory.org, a web application we built for the Philadelphia Department of Records that enables the geographic search and management of tens of thousands of historic photos and maps.

Currently, PhillyHistory users are able to search the website from their smart phones and compare the historic images from PhillyHistory.org with the location where they are standing.  If they are not standing in the street, they can also access  contemporary 360-degree street level views on PhillyHistory.org,  thanks to the system’s integration with Google Street View and Google Earth, to see what a location looks like today.  However, augmented reality technology is different in the sense that it enables users to access additional information about the world around them in relation to their location as they point their smart phone directly at a building or street.

Why are we involved in this?

Research.  While we hear and have read about unbelievably exciting projects using augmented reality, like the app released a few months ago by the Museum of London, augmented reality technology is still in its infancy and not much has been written about what is and is not possible.  The Philadelphia Department of Records was awarded an NEH Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant to research both the creation of historic photographs as overlays and how augmented reality scales with a very large database of assets. Remember, PhillyHistory.org currently holds over 93,000 assets (and is still growing)!

The Department of Records will initially provide point-and-view access to a subset of approximately 500 historic photographs of selected sites around the city (thanks to Deb Boyer and our great PhillyHistory interns*) for a prototype application we are building as part of our research. Users will be able to automatically access and view the historic photographs by simply pointing a smart phone at the contemporary site and selecting an available image.  The prototype application will focus on images from several neighborhoods in the downtown area although images from other neighborhoods will also be used in order to evaluate issues such as tree cover, building height and other sources for multi-path error that may affect the accuracy of the augmented reality display.  In addition to the 500 photographs, the project team will work with an advisory committee, three of whom are the co-editors of the planned Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia, to provide additional interpretive information for up to 20 of the 500 sites.

Josh Marcus who is working with Erik Osheim on the prototype application is already recording his progress in a Developer Journal on our Labs blog, but we are also planning to publish a white paper through NEH later this year to summarize our findings, which we will make available for free.  The white paper will outline our research into various methods for creating an augmented reality application as well as the implementation process in both iPhone and Android platforms.  We hope our conclusions on the successes and challenges will prove useful to other organizations considering implementation of augmented reality applications.

* Read captivating blogs written by Hillary Kativa, Timothy Horning, Leslie O’Neill, and Deb on PhillyHistory.org’s blog.  Great thanks go to our guest PhillyHistory bloggers as well: Steve Ujifusa, Ron Hoess, Shawn Evans, Christopher Dougherty, Harry Boonin, Ron Avery, and others.

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