A screenshot of a phone displaying the Augmented Reality – so here we have the view through the phone, showing the big blobs, each of which has a film attached. You play them by tapping on the film title at the bottom of the screen
A fantastic new way to look back at Plymouth’s historic past with Plymouth Shortcuts is now available 🙂
Belinda Dixon tells us more…
Plymouth Shortcuts is a digital system which enables people to watch snippets of South West Film and Television Archive footage at the Plymouth Waterfront, on their smartphones in the very places where the action original occurred.
It creates a trail of ten sites, so you can see 1930s seaplanes land on Plymouth Sound; watch a 1960s beauty contest at Tinside Pool; see Robert Lenkiewicz discuss painting beside his mural on The Parade; watch Sir Francis Chichester return from his record-breaking round the world voyage at West Hoe – and more.
Each of the flag-like blobs is the location of one of the mini-movies. The blue circle shows where the person was standing when they took the screen shot.
The locations and films in full are:
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Plymouth Gin – Southside St
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Lenkiewicz Mural – The Parade
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The Watering Hole (now The Ship) – The Parade
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Old Fish Market – Southside St
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Mayflower Steps
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Boat Trips – Phoenix Wharf
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Sea Planes – Hoe Foreshore
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Tinside Pool – Hoe Foreshore
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Plymouth Pier – Hoe Foreshore
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Sir Francis Chichester – West Hoe Foreshore
The archive material has been provided by the South West Film and Television Archive. Our use of innovative digital technology allows people to access it, in-situ, on their smartphones. It results in an evocative sense of Plymouth places, both past and present.
It’s a relatively simple system, but a very powerful one too.
There’s no charge from us to use Plymouth Shortcuts. The app it runs through (called Layar) is also free to download. The films range from 1 minute 20 to 2 minutes in length – watching all 10 mini films (total 16 minutes) is likely to use 13MB-56MB of data off 3G; but people will need to check their own data allowances.
Plymouth Shortcuts IS something people can experience all the time – the page on our website How To Watch The Films explains how it works.
What we’re doing as part of the Plymouth History Festival is two guided walks (Thursday 8th & Thursday 15th May), where we take people around the film sites, show them how it all works, and – if needed – let them borrow our smartphones. There’s a tab on our website which also explains about the walks. They do need to be booked – we have some spaces left.
Btw, technically, Plymouth Shortcuts isn’t in itself an app, it’s an Augmented Reality experience that runs through the app called Layar.
Find out more about Plymouth Shortcuts: http://plymouthshortcuts.wordpress.com
