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Time travel

A new London-based app, Timelooper, allows users to experience key moments in London’s history with just a smartphone and a cardboard headset.

IMAGINE WATCHING frantic shopkeepers busily extinguish the ‘Great Fire of London’ (a major conflagration that swept through the central parts of the English city of London for three days in 1666), or sheltering from Nazi bomb raids during the Blitz (the period of strategic bombing of the UK by Nazi Germany during World War II).

Now, thanks to a new virtual reality app, one can travel back in time to be immersed in these events.

A new London-based app, Timelooper, allows users to experience key moments in London’s history with just a smartphone and a cardboard headset.

For example, when Timelooper co-founder Andrew Feinberg visits the Tower of London, a historic castle on the banks of London’s Thames River, he doesn’t queue up with hordes of tourists to catch a glimpse of the royal family’s crown jewels. Instead, he uses Timelooper’s time travel tourism app to experience the tower over 750 years ago in 1255.

Instead of seeing a busy London tourist site, Feinberg sees a medieval marketplace, a formidable fortress, even an elephant being led down a path.

“We actually overlay the current infrastructure with what the infrastructure of the tower and the surrounding environment was like in 13th-century London,” Feinberg was quoted as saying by the media. “So, for example, now you see a Starbucks and now you see the tower as it looks today with the moat drained. When we take you back in time, you actually see the historically accurate representation of the tower in its heyday.”

Not far away at St Paul’s Cathedral, Timelooper users travel back to the Great Fire of London 350 years ago in 1666. The fire burned for four days, destroying over 13,000 houses.

The smartphone’s built-in motion detection allows time travellers wearing a cardboard headset to move their gaze around the virtual world, seemingly exploring London centuries ago. The videos are location-based, meaning visitors must visit the sites to unlock the historical experiences.

Feinberg and his co-founder, Yigit Yigiter, were frustrated with current tourism technology, which, they say, hasn’t evolved much since the introduction of audio guides. In 2014, Yigiter’s wife brought home a Google cardboard (virtual reality) VR headset, and he began thinking about an immersive VR tourism experience. By September 2015, he’d quit his job in private equity and moved to the British capital to begin work on the first incarnation of the app. The first version was launched in July 2015 and featured three sites.

While Timelooper uses VR to offer a unique historical perspective, the technology has been exploding in many directions throughout the tourism industry. US-based Carnival Cruise Line uses it to market cruises, the Dollywood theme park in Tennessee in the US uses it to show off a new rollercoaster, and the Seattle Space Needle in the US uses it to help visitors appreciate the view from its sky-high observatory. The Dali Museum in Florida, US, created a virtual reality experience that lets visitors walk through a landscape painting by the Surrealist master Salvador Dali. And a company called YouVisit has created over 300 VR experiences for destinations from Vatican City to Mexico.

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First published on: 20-03-2016 at 00:04 IST
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