CI-Spy

Creative Director and Co-Principal Investigator
Christiansburg Institute, Christiansburg, VA, 2012
Funded by a National Science Foundation (NSF) Grant
~Awarded tenure in spring, 2016

CI-Spy is an going collaborative project to bring to life the Christiansburg Institute, the first African-American high school in southwestern Virginia. With Todd Ogle (Technology-enhanced Learning and Online Strategies department at Virginia Tech) and David Hicks (College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences), I am researching and testing a new mobile software app that will allow school children visiting historic sites, like the Christiansburg Institute, to learn in new interactive ways via augmented reality. Through the app, the user’s view of the real world is enhanced with additional objects and information through the camera lens of a smartphone or tablet. Students and other users can thus “see” a historic structure as it appeared decades ago. They can explore the site and examine various objects as would a historian, looking for points of historical interest. Further, users will be able to read historic documents, view photographs, and listen to audio such as oral history interviews related to the location they are visiting.

My role as creative director in the project was help shape the visual elements of the augmented reality, using archived photos of the Christiansburg Institute, and to model and texturize all twelve original buildings in 3D. In the future, the team will be adding terrain data from a quad copter capturing images and creating 3D data from photogrammetry.

Collaborators: Aaron Johnson (Virginia Tech), David Hicks (Virginia Tech); Rosemary Zlokas (Virginia Tech), Gurjot Singh (Virginia Tech); David Cline (Virginia Tech), Todd Ogle (Virginia Tech); and Doug Bowman (Virginia Tech)