Demo Hour

DEMO HOUR: The Loupe

The Loupe resembles a magnifying glass. It is made of a round wooden frame that conceals a mobile phone. Visitors use the Loupe to discover more about objects on display. The Loupe shows an outline of a heritage object on the screen. The visitor then looks for that outline in their surroundings. When a real-life object and its outline match, the augmented reality app on the phone recognizes which content needs to be displayed. The visitor then tilts the Loupe to get more content or shakes it to move on to the next object. A new outline of an object is displayed as a suggestion for the visitor to continue.

Van der Vaart, M. and Damala, A. Through the Loupe: Visitor engagement with a primarily text-based handheld AR application. Proc. of Digital Heritage 2015. IEEE, 2015.

Damala, A., Hornecker, E., van der Vaart, M., van Dijk, D., and Ruthven, I. The Loupe: Tangible augmented reality for learning to look at Ancient Greek art. Mediterranean Archaeology and Archaeometry 16, 5 (2016), 73–85.

https://www.mesch-project.eu/mesch-prototype-the-loupe/

Dick van Dijk, Waag Technology & Society
[email protected]

A visitor uses the Loupe to look for the matching shape on the ceiling.

When the user points the Loupe at the vase, the AR app detects the right shape and displays the graphics and text.