An interactive visualization of the past using a situated simulation approach

This paper describes aspects of the development of an interactive installation for visualizing a 3D reconstruction of a historical church chapel in Kolding, Denmark. We focus on three aspects inherent to a mobile Augmented Reality development context; 1) A procedure for combating gyroscope drift on handheld devices, 2) achieving realistic lighting computation on a mobile platform at interactive frame-rates and 3) an approach to relocation within this applications situated location without position tracking. We present a solution to each of these three aspects. The development is targeted a specific application, but the presented solutions should be relevant to researchers and developers facing similar issues in other contexts. We furthermore present initial findings from everyday usage by visitors at the museum, and explore how these findings can be useful in connection with novel technology for facilitating information transfer to a museum audience. The installation is in active commercial use and is currently logging further user interactions via in-application logging for future investigations in line with this project.