Output details

History Space: Downhill Demesne

History Space is a location-based mobile application that explores how leading-edge mobile application technologies might be applied to create site specific, locationally-accessed multimedia content for Downhill Demesne, a site of significant cultural importance situated on the north coast of Northern Ireland.

The content delivered through the mobile application links digital site-specific information to the referenced physical world to provide a new model for cultural exchange about a place of cultural and historical significance. Using the latest mobile technologies including augmented reality, geo-location, and gamficiation methods, the History Space app provides visitors to Downhill with new forms of immersive interpretive content to tell the history of the Earl Bishop’s estate. In understanding the politics and poetics of these geo-media platforms and the approaches to content design that promote both a window of illusion and a surface for action in the mobile device, the analysis of the application designed provides a framework for understanding the hybridity of these forms as new cultural documents.

History Space is part of a transnational project funded by the EU’s Northern Periphery Programme. The wider aim of the transnational project is to establish mobile location information services, as a method for adding value to the visitor experience at rural and remote destinations. The project extends access to and provides the effective use of mobile communication devices and their applications as a means of developing tourism in those areas, which have an abundance of cultural and natural resources but that are difficult to access and promote given the region’s rurality and peripherality.

The application is available for download from the iTunes App Store and Google Play.

For the iPad and iPhone applications, go to https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/history-space/id604932739?mt=8

As the mobile application insists on a location-based experience, this has been curated at www.historyspace.eu