App reflects past on cell screen

KOLKATA: Have you ever looked at the Victoria Memorial and thought how it might have looked with bamboo scaffoldings all over it at the time of its construction between 1906 and 1921? Walking past hordes of hawkers outside Indian Museum, did you ever woner how the place looked in 1840, when the museum re-located from the annals of the Asiatic Society to its current location? Here's a mobile app that can make it possible.
You just have to download it on your smartphone, aim the phone at a heritage building and click. You'll have the old image of the building right in front of you.
The result of a long-standing research by Jadavpur University and the University of Liverpool, UK, the scholars involved in the project felt that while much of their copious findings is of pure academic interest, there are some results that can be shared with citizens at large.
Between 2013-15, scholars of the two universities bagged a project funded jointly by the UGC and UKIERI to study cross cultural exchanges in selected Indian cities. The scholars studied the influences on Portugese Goa, French Pondicherry , British Kolkata and compared these experiences with Chandigarh, which was a new city created in post colonial India. While eminent JU faculty of English Supriya Chaudhuri led her scholars, Nandini Das, a former Rhodes scholar of Oxford and a PhD from Cambridge, led her team from the UK varsity .
“Our research took us to the British Library , a treasure trove of rare photog raphs of heritage buidings of Kolkata.With the help of John Falkner, lead curator of visual arts at the British Library, we were introduced to these photographs.The idea of digitizing these and using technology to keep them in the public domain came to us then,“ Chaudhuri said.
The augmented reality app -Time scape Kolkata -was created jointly by technologist-architect from Liverpool, Martin Winchester and research scholar duo Sujaan Mukherjee and Kawshik Kirtania from JU. They have used open-access digital tool `Layar' that in turn took into consideration not only the archival photographs but also the exact geo-co-ordinates of the heritage structure in consideration. “For the moment, we have been able to upload photographs and details of 100 heritage buildings in the city . The list will increase. As you walk or drive past and have accessed the app on your phone, if any of these 100 buildings are within a kilometer's radius, you will be alerted.The GPS will indicate both you and your position vis a vis these buildings,“ Chaudhuri added.