Civilisations AR is an app created by the BBC that allows the user to view and interact with historical objects to learn more about them. I thoroughly enjoyed having Tutankhamen and the Rosetta Stone appear in my apartment. I ran into some issues– I think most of them can be attributed to me using an iPhone while the app was designed for use with an iPad.
I’ve laid out a few things I found really great about the app, as well as some problems I encountered and things I think could be improved:
Pros:
- Really cool visuals
- Can scale objects up and get closer than you would often be able to in a museum
- Great audio components–you can pull up a big article on each object but I enjoyed clicking around the audio snippets to have to object narrated to me
- The menu for selecting items is really cool–its a big floating globe and you can scroll around it and look at artifacts from different areas of the world
- It’s just super fun to have a mummy in your living room
- I can see how this could be really effective in an educational setting–kids exploring artifacts from home, maybe being assigned to explore and report back on artifacts they found interesting
- Camera feature to take screen captures of the experience
Cons:
- Designed for the iPad, so users like me trying to use their phone might run into trouble–the app got stuck on me a couple times and I had to reboot it in order for it to work again. I assume this would be better on the device the app was built for
- Tutorial was a bit confusing– I wasn’t sure when I had achieved the objective and sometimes was confused as to why it wasn’t letting me move on in the tutorial
- Audio only worked for me in headphones, which wasn’t clear from the outset
- The app doesn’t allow you to scale objects smaller than they actually are in real life–this became a problem for me when trying to walk around a human-sized sarcophagus in my cramped apartment
- Many of the objects are housed in English museums–the app does a good job of citing sources and telling you where you can view the item in real life. Which is great… but it underscores the fact that so many of these objects have been dispossessed of their homelands and are now sequestered in British museums–often The British Museum. Come to think of it, that’s probably part of why this app was made
- Objects take a while to load. But again, this could be because I’m not using the app’s intended device–the iPad
- Screen capture option goes away when interacting with the object in any way–listening to audio or reading text
Overall, I found Civilisations AR to be an app that sparked my curiosity, and made me excited to explore more objects and learn about them. I wish the experience were a bit more seamless but I suspect that would be improved with time and with using the intended device (iPad)–although I think they should make the app useable on a phone so they can reach a wider audience.