Remembering the City: Stumbling Stones, Memory Sites and Augmented Reality

Abstract

This paper describes the development of Remembering the City, a digital and public humanities project on an urban scale, which takes advantage of augmented reality techniques in order to bring memories of the Holocaust victims to the surface of the urban fabric. The project has been built in conjunction with the Stolpersteine (Stumbling Stones), the largest decentralized monument in Europe dedicated to the Holocaust, allowing for the first time a contextual access to information related to the stones. The paper describes the conceptual design of the project, the technical challenge of tracking bi-dimensional objects in the outdoors and the ethical concerns. The iterative development led to prototypical implementations that were tested with two evaluation studies, performed respectively with 10 volunteers aged between 30 and 50 and 22 students from a local high school. Both studies provided valuable feedback and directions for future development.