You'll have to excuse my history geekiness for a moment (come now people, you know you have it too)...THIS IS SO COOL!!!
http://activehistory.ca/2011/07/like-history-theres-an-app-for-that/
http://zeitag.net/ZeitagTO.html
It's an app that allows you to view historic photos of Toronto in your current location on your Iphone. I've seen things like this before, but never specifc to Toronto. Oh how I love the "historical gaze", what I define as the attempt to picture and formulate past actions in a particular historical space. This project and simiar ones being born from the Iphone phenomenon allows the 'historical gaze' to be rooted moreso in reality than ones imagination can do alone.
I especially enjoyed this comment from the above article:
" 'We don’t want the city covered in bronze – there are various platforms to bring information to the public. This way, you can tell as many stories as you want,' Blakeley recently said. Physical plaques serve a purpose, especially for those without smartphones. But apps on iPhones and other devices offer the ability to expand the number of (virtual) plaques, and what a plaque can do."
Also, I've spoken to John Walsh at Carleton University about another exciting project:
" Historical Landscapes of the Chaudiere: Augmented Reality Apps for Environmental Histories, currently in development, will use AR to translate an existing walking tour of Ottawa created by graduate students in the Public History program at Carleton University to one you can do with your smartphone. The project, funded by the Network in Canadian History & Environment (NiCHE), will 'demonstrate how the very direct relationships between geographical ‘mappings’ of heritage and place-based mobile computing privileges narratives of environmental history and will provide a model for using this technology in other landscapes.' Exciting stuff."
This reminds me of the Heritage Toronto iTours: http://www.heritagetoronto.org/discover-toronto/itours
