Seeing History through a New Lens (and Looking Cool While Doing It!)

The next time you embark on a tour of your favourite historical site, park, or landmark, you may not want to forget your sunglasses.  Now these wouldn't be your regular run of the mill sunglasses that merely protect your eyes and show off your style.  Rather, they would be history-enhancing sunglasses, allowing you to see what no longer exists in front of you.  Imagine that you are walking along the rue du Petit-Champlain in Quebec City.  It would probably look similar to the image below.

Quite charming, isn't it? However, as an educated individual, you know that the rue du Petit-Champlain didn't always look this way and you wish there was some way to experience the changes to this historic road over time.  That is where your sunglasses come in.

When you put on your sunglasses, they take a scan of your immediate surroundings and send  a digital image to a photographic database over a 3G network.  The database matches the scanned photo to historical digitized images of the same location and then proceeds to project those images onto the lenses of your sunglasses.  The image is thus overlaid onto your vision of the actual surroundings, allowing you to see change over time. In this case, the sunglasses retrieve the following images:

 1880

 1916

1923

1978

While these sunglasses are only a hypothetical invention in my attempt to marry an everyday object with an interactive historical element, I was inspired by technology that already exists.  In imagining how these sunglasses might find appropriate photographs, I thought of Google's feature that allows you to drag images into the search bar to find visually similar images.  I tested this search feature using the first image displayed above and it was successful in finding other images of the rue du Petit-Champlain. However, the older images did not appear in the results. 

Another technology that came to mind in thinking about this project is the augmented reality device showing the digital reconstruction of Yuanmingyuan garden.  The original garden structures were looted and burned by French-Anglo forces in 1860 and were left to deteriorate.  You can still see the ruins today, or you can look through the augmented reality viewer developed by the Beijing Institute of Technology to see a digitally reconstructed view of the original structures. The video below demonstrates the process.

With these technologies in mind, the sunglasses do not seem entirely implausible.  Just don't hold your breath waiting for them to show up at your nearest Wal-Mart.