Historic Locations
Fascinating history unfolded right where your site or business stands today. Show your visitors why your location is a memorable place so that you stand out in their minds. Your location's story comes alive on their mobile phones during their visit with just a QR code.
Overview
The history surrounding your business is a powerful story waiting to be shared. By embracing the rich past of your location, you create a deeper sense of authenticity and connection with your community. When people see the historical significance of where they are, your business becomes more memorable, standing out as a place that values both heritage and innovation.
At Running Reality, we’re passionate about making history engaging and accessible. With cutting-edge technology like mobile-based augmented reality, we bring the past to life in an immersive and interactive way. Northern Virginia is filled with incredible stories — let’s showcase how your location is a vital part of that history while demonstrating your forward-thinking vision for the future.
Solutions
Interactive Site History
- Augmented Reality
- Interactive people
- Use existing site data
Content Creation
- Local university partners will build 2D and 3D content
- Provide detailed content and guidelines for interactive people.
Examples
Our prototype has been used in Northern Virginia to bring the history of both battlefield and historic sites to life. If you can not visit these sites yourself, the following images show examples of what the experience is like on visitor's mobile devices.
Interactive People
Hosting a "living historian" or a reenactor turns a historical site into an immersive experience, bringing the past to life through storytelling, period-accurate demonstrations, and hands-on activities. They boost engagement, encourage repeat visits, create deeper connections, and lasting memories.
Hosting a digital historical reenactor brings history to life through interactive technology. They can be an efficient tour guide (even when your staff are busy) to make history accessible anytime with personalized, real-time interactions. They ensure that history remains dynamic, interactive, and relevant in the digital age. Running Reality has interactive site guides, interactive historical figures, and interactive anonymous regular people.
You can choose what level of digital interactivity you feel fits your location and your visitors. You can control any chat dialog options. If you have students, young people, and teens who visit you, you can activate a "scavenger hunt" feature where the reenactor can be talked into doing a silly dance. Collecting these scavenger hunt items is shown to drive much higher engagement with younger people and they engage the reenactor longer and hear more about your site's history.
Content Creation
Augmented Reality is new and exciting but has also be very expensive. We are using our integrated world history model to reduce costs and make it accessible for all historical sites. A single digital history editor generates the 2D and 3D data with advanced tools to make the process quicker and more accurate. This single world model can be viewed with a single global augmented reality engine. This is not a custom solution with expensive custom technology for each site. It means a single low-cost solution with technology costs amortized over all sites.
Running Reality works with university partners in the local area to provide the well-researched digital history. Undergraduate and graduate digital historians generate content upon which you can rely to showcase the history of your site.
The primary cost of content creation is the research and data entry. The exact cost would scale based on whether Running Reality already has some data for your site from the work of others and the level of detail of historical features to add. For instance, 2D building footprints are much faster than full 3D.
We are developing Generative AI tools to streamline the process of adding content. So, we can add more content in phases as new tools come online. For example, today we create the 3D people and objects at a site using new generative AI tools. In just the last few months, Gen AI can now create 3D people reliably from a single historical photo. We are building a capability to generate 3D building textures from historic street-level photos of buildings and neighborhoods.
Headsets
Running Reality is compatible with "cardboard" viewers. These are low-cost 3D headset viewers
made literally of cardboard and two lenses. When in Running Reality's augmented reality "live" mode,
you can tap the small 
cardboard icon in the lower right corner to enter cardboard mode on your phone.
The phone then splits its view into a stereo view and you slide the phone into the cardboard viewer.
You then have a fun, simple truly 3D experience. Running Reality can provide the viewers.
Learn More
We would love to answer any further questions, explore options, and develop a custom quote with you.
Send the Running Reality team an email: