App Stadtgeist Karlsruhe enables virtual time travel
If you look to the north at the intersection of Kriegsstraße, Ettlinger Straße and Karl-Friedrich-Straße in Karlsruhe city center, you will see a large shopping center and several office buildings from the 1970s. If you have your smartphone with you, you can also use the camera to take a virtual look into the past and play back pictures and interesting stories of the historic Ettlinger Tor.
This journey through time is made possible by the Stadtgeist Karlsruhe augmented history app with a wealth of information about the city’s history. It is a free service provided by the city for its citizens and visitors with stories from, with and about Karlsruhe. The app has been available in the app store since 2015 and has been continuously expanded since then. There are currently 18 city markers in the city center and more in Knielingen, with additional markers in Durlach in the pipeline for 2021 as part of a major citizen participation project.
In cooperation with the City of Karlsruhe’s Science Office, the concept was implemented together with the development company bluehands GmbH & Communication KG as part of the SmarterCity initiative of the Economic Development Agency.
The Stadtgeist app is available free of charge for iPhone (from iPhone4s), Android or Windows Phone.
Augmented reality with exciting audio and video contributions
Curious visitors from young to old can use the navigation function of the Stadtgeist app to be guided to the individual sights and experience their city from a completely new perspective. Using the principle of augmented reality, the camera then provides images of what once happened at the respective city landmarks. There is also a wealth of information on the history of the individual places as well as entertaining audio and video clips. “The special thing about this project, however, is that the content was created together with the local residents,” says bluehands Managing Director Aydin Mir Mohammadi. Most of the ideas for the content of the Stadtgeist app were developed in open workshops with the citizens’ associations. “That’s why the coronavirus crisis slowed us down a bit,” says Mir Mohammadi. Nevertheless, digital participation processes have made it possible to drive the project forward in recent months and design city brands for Durlach. So anyone interested can look forward to it.
Stories behind the story
So far, the app has been downloaded by around 10,000 users. Thanks to the close cooperation with the citizens of Karlsruhe, the Stadtgeist app provides a look behind the scenes of the fan-shaped city. “We don’t just provide soft postcard motifs. We are interested in the stories behind the history,” emphasizes Mir Mohammadi. Karlsruhe as one of the centers of RAF terror in the 1970s is therefore just as much a topic in the app as the role of Nobel Prize winner and poison gas developer Fritz Haber in the First World War. And at the city marker at the Federal Constitutional Court, users of the app are shown one of the saddest chapters in the city’s 300-year history. On February 28, 1847, 63 people lost their lives in a fire at the then court theater on the site of today’s Constitutional Court. “Through our app, we were able to create a digital memorial to the victims of this drama,” emphasizes Mir Mohammadi.
Award-winning concept
The foundation stone for the development of the Stadtgeist app was laid back in 2013. The winner of the international AppCampusAward competition organized by Microsoft and Nokia received 70,000 euros for the further development of the concept submitted to .