Seeing Fountain City through the Coffins’ eyes with augmented reality.
In the years leading up to the Civil War, countless freedom-seekers traveling north found solace and support for their journeys in places known as stations on the Underground Railroad, including in Newport, Ind. More than 200 years later, the town has gone through dramatic changes — and its name is just the beginning.
Now known as Fountain City, Newport was home to a multitude of buildings with important connections to the community’s work supporting freedom-seekers, including the home of abolitionists Levi and Catharine Coffin.
While many of those buildings no longer exist, visitors exploring the Levi and Catharine Coffin State Historic Site can still see Fountain City the way the Coffins would have thanks to a collaboration with students from the Purdue Polytechnic Institute Richmond incorporating digital technology into site tours.
In autumn of 2024, the students began collaborating with Site Manager Joanna Hahn to recreate a view of mid-1800s Newport using augmented reality.
Augmented reality (AR) superimposes a three-dimensional image onto a real-world setting. AR has been widely used for years — it applies face filters that gives users dog ears or other digital features on Snapchat or projects an image of a creature in front of gamers playing Pokémon Go. But its uses can go far beyond entertainment.
“In the historical field it can be helpful,” said Hahn. “Augmented reality can assist in our understanding of what historical landscapes were like.”
After Hahn chose key locations that connect to the town’s Underground Railroad history, the students in the school’s computer graphics technology program created renderings of those sites and uploaded them to a smart device app called Arloopa, which is available on the App Store and Google Play.
For example, the site of the Coffins’ first home and their dry goods store now contains a parking lot for a local business. With augmented reality, visitors can point their device’s camera at the lot and see images of those buildings.
Now, visitors have the option to use Arloopa during their tours to digital time travel and visualize Fountain City the way it was when the Coffins were there. This can help provide important context to the stories of not only the Coffins but also the freedom-seekers they helped and the Fountain City community.
