A colleague of mine had sent this along to me due to my interest in augmented reality and her general all-around good naturedness and helpfulness. A project to develop a mobile application that allows the user to orient themselves in respect to the New York City skyline and posit the World Trade Centers there. Appropriate considering the 10th anniversary is coming up, but also representing a general trend (hopefully) of using technology to position collective cultural memory in our daily lives. It is my estimation that we have enough data to support this imposing of collective memory (via photographs, video, audio even) on geopositioned physical locations, but it becomes a matter of aggregating it and presenting it predictably. If one does this with a pleasant enough design experience, users will be stimulated to experiment in positioning these objects in these skylines and landscapes and then sharing these online. Crowdsourcing the specifics of our collective memory. Constructivist history. Brilliant.

He is already fully funded through Kickstarter so it must have struck a nerve with others as well. Now, lets do Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project as an augmented reality application throughout Paris and embed cultural commentary and postmodernism in this waking life! Infuse our structure with collective memory, commentary, even debat. Thrilling.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZY-BpEB0lg]

By Michael Gallagher

My name is Michael Sean Gallagher. I am a Lecturer in Digital Education at the Centre for Research in Digital Education at the University of Edinburgh. I am Co-Founder and Director of Panoply Digital, a consultancy dedicated to ICT and mobile for development (M4D); we have worked with USAID, GSMA, UN Habitat, Cambridge University and more on education and development projects. I was a researcher on the Near Futures Teaching project, a project that explores how teaching at The University of Edinburgh unfold over the coming decades, as technology, social trends, patterns of mobility, new methods and new media continue to shift what it means to be at university. Previously, I was the Research Associate on the NERC, ESRC, and AHRC Global Challenges Research Fund sponsored GCRF Research for Emergency Aftershock Forecasting (REAR) project. I was an Assistant Professor at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies (한국외국어대학교) in Seoul, Korea. I have also completed a doctorate at University College London (formerly the independent Institute of Education, University of London) on mobile learning in the humanities in Korea.

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