Historic Immersive Photographic Exhibition

This project explored the use of augmented reality (AR) to create immersive experiences from a collection of digitised historical photographs of Swansea, primarily from the 1950s and 60s.

Before creating the AR experiences, students had to digitise physical photographic negatives from the 1950's and 1960's Swansea. These negatives (ownde by Blackpill Local History Society) contained images which had never been seen before, offering a new glimpse back into the cities history.

Students trialled and tested two different methods for digitisng the negatives (Traditional Scanning and DLSR Scanning), the method that was chosen, throguh student led exploartion and testing, was the traditional method of scanning. Once images were scanned, they had to go through a quality process where some images were restored, cropped and the balck and white levels were rebalanced.

Next students developed AR overlays (using Adobe Aero) for selected images, which allowed viewers to interact with the photos using their mobile devices. These overlays included features such as colourised versions of the black-and-white images, then-and-now comparisons using photos from 2024, Google Maps links to the location that the shot was taken from, descriptive text, and quiz-style prompts to encourage engagement.

The 2.5 hour exhibition was attended by over 100 people including parents, friends and a lot of the local history community. As this was a community focussed and client based project, accuracy within colourisation, image descriptions etc had to be research informed and quality checked by our student project manager, Keira Amour. The success of the project has led to a local historian requesting an article to be written by myself about the event, which will be published in the 2025 Swansea History Journal.