Exploring Cultural Heritage in Augmented Reality with GoFind!

Historic photo collections are important instruments to document the development of cityscapes in the course of time. However, in most cases, such historic photos are buried in archives that are not easily accessible. But even when cultural heritage archives are opened and exposed to the public, for instance by specialized digital libraries, the value of the individual images is limited as they can only be used in the context of the digital library's retrieval engine and independent of the actual location that is being displayed. With GoFind!, we bring the retrieval engine of historic multimedia collections to mobile devices. The system provides location-based querying in historic multimedia collections and adds an augmented reality-based user interface that enables the overlay of historic images and the current view. GoFind! can be used by historians and tourists and provides a virtual view into the past of a city.