Collaging the Landscape Histories and Constructing Memories Through Augmented Reality

Located at the intersection between collage, multimedia narratives, and contemporary media technology, this thesis explores how an augmented reality (AR) environment may help people to explore a landscape’s history. This work develops a digital walk with historic elements in AR deployed at Allegheny Commons West Park, a historic site in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Traditionally, digital cultural heritage experiences tend to be organized in a linear narrative structure and static content. The experience design of this project challenges this convention and uses a non-linear collage based approach. Audiences are guided to positions that offer a viewpoint where virtual content collages assemble into a complete scenario. Viewed from this point audiences can then perceive the historical elements such as people, buildings and environment. In addition, audiences find and form their own trajectories through the designed scenarios, and develop an understanding of the history of the landscape through open-ended exploration of the AR collages. By detailing the technical structure of the system, the thesis also introduces a preliminary workflow for the design of digital cultural heritage experiences with non-linear collage-based narratives.