Lichfield Time Travellers
Historical Holograms
Bringing the past to life…
With new 3D capture and augmented reality, the magic of meeting people from the past has never been more real.
This opens up amazing avenues for this great adventure to explore new forms of physical-digital storytelling with a human face. (If this is something you’re interested in too then we’d love to speak with you)
We used this combination of narrative and technology as the core foundation for Lichfield Time Travellers, hiding time portals around the city for audiences to discover and open.
This creates a ‘rip in space time’, with people from the past pulled through into the modern world – sharing their stories, in their own words wherever possible, and leaving artefacts behind for audiences to collect.
Site visit to Lichfield
Getting under the city’s skin…
Working with local experts, museums, the Cathedral, and passionate tour guides, we explored the streets and stories of this historic Staffordshire city.
The joy of this approach, speaking with people who spend large amounts of their time researching these stories and getting to know the characters, is that for these people, it’s personal, and that’s fantastic. David Titley, one of the guides, had even written and performed a one man show about St Chad, for example.
Through this collaboration, we identified an initial set of characters – famous and unknown, male and female – whose stories could speak to different periods in the city’s history, and different aspects of its character.
Statue of Samuel JOhnson
Lichfield’s sons and daughters…
Famous characters included the iconic Samuel Johnson, creator of the first Dictionary of the English Language, and David Garrick who invented theatre the way we know it today, Anna Seward the ‘poet swan’ of Lichfield, and Francis Barber, one of the earliest people of colour to be elected to public office.
In addition, we constructed a number of characters inspired by local records, accounts, and rumours, including the landlady of a local pub who plays her part in the restoration of the Cathedral, St Chad, the reason why Lichfield exists in the first place, and an enthusiastic amateur anatomist on his way to a public dissection at the hands of Erasmus Darwin.
The filming of St Chad
Production…
With the characters and their locations agreed, we scripted a set of solo, location-based performances.
(Due to the nature of the experience, and not wanting audiences to have autonomy, this approach was more appropriate that the explicitly site-specific one we used for Tamworth Castle AR Explorer)
Reaching out to local actors, we crafted a set of performances around these scripts, and organised costumes for some, while other people brought their own – another great thing about working with passionate people.
For ten days, we occupied a green screen studio in Birmingham, set up and calibrated the reality capture cameras, and scheduled our performers.
One by one, we recorded their performances as 3D film pieces with live sound, and brought these together with special effects using game engines, and developed the AR app, with live mapping, for iOS and Android.
On site testing with the Visit Lichfield team
An unexpected bump in the road…
Our team puts in a lot of work behind the scenes, so to speak, to ensure that these novel 3D media experience can be accessible on as many devices as possible, not just the latest and greatest.
During the development, a new graphics chip was introduced into a range of handsets which did not accept the format of 3D media we were creating.
After some investigation, we developed a workaround for those devices with the new chips that ensures no one needs to miss out.
This was a valuable learning experience for us, and means we now have a secure alternative solution and process that actually makes the AR experiences even more widely accessible, especially for older and lower range devices.
Agnes Pennifather stands up for the women of Lichfield
The outcome…
Over many trips to Lichfield, we went through the testing phase, fixing bugs, and tweaking the locations of characters.
We engaged with the wider team from Visit Lichfield to get them confident with using the AR app and talking about the new experience.
Finally, we were ready to publish.
If you haven’t been to Lichfield before, it’s well worth a visit. The architecture is beautiful, as is the Cathedral, and there are lots of little museums to explore, cafes, bars, and restaurants.
The experience leads you around the city, and it’s designed so that you can drop in and out of the experience to visit another museum, or grab a bite to eat, on your journey.
You can download Lichfield Time Travellers for free using the links below:
Francis Barber on his way to his favourite fishing spot