The Ancient Ohio Trail

The AOT promotes exploring the distinguished Native American Heritage in the Midwest, highlighting the historic local settings while suggesting tours and roadtrips among Ohio's historic towns and scenic roads, and cultural, artistic and tourist amenities. Virtual Grounds designed and launched the web portal, mobile companion, and 2D map tour. During our long partnership with the AOT leadership, VGI brought to the project an innovative approach to virtual map tours for heritage sites including AR components for four earthworks sites.

Client: University of Cincinnati / CERHAS and the Ohio State University; project funded in 2012 by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)

• Explore the Ancient Ohio Trail

  A comprehensive portal for visitors to immerse in the heartland of ancient America, where spectacular cultures created the largest concentration of geometric earthen architecture in the world. The website includes resources for planing a complete travel experience.

• Transmedia Approach

  The web portal includes multimedia resources such as video clips and audio for PC users, and a mobile website companion optimized for smartphone visualization for information on-the-go.

• Forefront of Emerging Tech

  Plans for developing the AOT project included emerging technology components from the start. VGI designed and developed AR tours for four earthworks sites featured in the Ancient Ohio Trail. AR was also used to visualize virtual models of selected Hopewell artifacts.

Embracing Augmented Reality

The Ancient Ohio Trail is a comprehensive project about four of Ohio’s two-thousand-year-old Hopewell-era earthworks, whose monumental forms and scale are sometimes invisible due to degradation or undergrowth. Augmented reality was introduced early in its inception to support interpretation and visualization of the sites and bring to the public access to significant artifacts. Both projects developed for the AOT were pioneer in employing AR for cultural projects, at a time when few understood the technology.

Historical Artifacts in AR

At the launch of the project in 2012, VGI designed and developed an application for the visualization of 3D models of selected archaeological artifacts from the Ancient Ohio Trail project using AR technology. A set of 10 artifacts were triggered by scanning markers from a PDF available for download from the AOT website.

AR Channels for On-Site Tours

VGI designed and developed AR tours for four earthworks sites featured in the Ancient Ohio Trail project, implemented in 2013. The tours were launched by scanning a QR Code with a smartphone and showed several points of interest around the visitor in real time. The floating POIs helped guide the walking tour and also provided extensive written information about the stops.