The PILOT Innovation Challenge sought ideas that would help local radio and TV broadcasters engage their communities with next generation content. History Go, an Augmented Reality app that displays historic images and facts, won second place.
Make sure to read about the first and third place winners In Your Shoes and The News Call.
History Go uses augmented reality to allow users to view their surroundings in the way that they once were. “Imagine that you’re walking down the streets of New York and you see the Empire State Building” says Jordan Sales, History Go’s project leader. “You could pull out your phone and open History Go, and instead of seeing the building in 2016, you could see it as it was in 1930 when it was being built, with facts and history and first hand accounts.”
“We thought it would be a really interesting way to connect people with the history around them. When you can see where you are with pictures and videos and those ideas, it allows you to experience the history and the past in much more real way than ever before.”
History Go was born in the Rodney Hill’s Texas A&M creativity class, Design Process 101. The class grouped students with different majors together to work on creating new ideas.
Jordan and her team thought about their app in terms of news. But given the multitude of news sources, they felt that the space was too crowded.
“We thought that instead of current events, we could look at past events. We thought that it would be interesting to update people with what had happened around them so that they could better understand what was currently happening.”
After the Challenge, Jordan and her team are looking at joining the Texas A&M incubator Startup Aggieland.
“It’s like an entrepreneurship center, with all these great business and science professors and all of these great engineers who put their time in. Once the whole busy part of getting to [Innovation Challenge events in] California and New York is over, we’re really going to look at applying and pairing with them,” Jordan said.
