Thanks to one little girl, some of Beijing’s historical gates have been “rebuilt,” Shanghai Daily reports.
The girl's father, who just so happens to be an augmented reality (AR) engineer at Baidu, was inspired to pair AR technology with a smartphone app to allow people to glimpse the capital’s former city gates. Users just have to hold their phones up to the sites of the old gates to see a 3D-animated overlay showing what the area used to look like. Each image is accompanied by a short, but informative, commentary about the history of the structures.
The idea came to Li Yingchao while he was riding on subway Line 2 – which travels along the old wall – with his 4-year-old daughter. She asked, “Why do so many stops have the word ‘men’ (gate) in their names?” And that's when Li had an epiphany.
In a rapidly changing city, some aspects of Beijing’s history are becoming less and less well-known among the younger generation. And this is part of the reason why Li and his team of 20 developers devised this project that would use AR technology to give locals and visitors alike an interactive history lesson.
From the 13th century, Beijing had 20 city gates, which functioned to usher different classes of people in and out of the capital.
There were only nine city gates in the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties. These were mostly torn down in the 1960s, to make room for subways, trains and roads. Only one and a half gates were left, including the complete Zhengyangmen gate and the half gate of Deshengmen archers’ tower.
“[AR] helps people to learn the history and the changes of the city,” says deputy curator Hu Daxin of Beijing Planning Exhibition Hall.
[Image via Shanghai Daily]
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