New Neon Sign App for Smart Phones

[Erik Sine]

Check out this app I just happened to come across, so interesting and filled with history.

Go to your app store and download "The Visible City"






VANCOUVER (NEWS1130) – It was known as liquid light (Vancouver was infamous for it) and you can now take a walking tour of the city and see the streets as they were during the rise and fall of the neon era.

Visible City is an app launched this week by the Museum of Vancouver (MOV) that uses interviews, your smartphone’s GPS and camera, and augmented reality to layer old pictures over the current streetscape.

“It’s a virtual exhibition,” says curator Hanna Cho. “It invites people to treat the city as a museum itself.”

The mobile tour tracks the rise, fall, and revival of neon in Vancouver, shining a light on people whose lives played out under the lights, their stories creating a “textured social history of Vancouver, illuminated by neon.”

“There are a number of interactive time-shifting features,” Cho tells News1130. “It offers up audio narratives, archival photos, some written text, vignettes, and memories that people share about places like the Ovaltine Cafe and the hustle and bustle of Granville Street during concerts or people like Joey Keithley talking about doing gigs at the Smiling Buddha.”

But it is the augmented reality feature that the MOV is really excited about.

“It layers an old photo over the spot you’re standing in. For example, if you’re at West Pender and Columbia Street, there’s Foo’s Ho Ho Restaurant and it used to have an enormous neon sign gracing the corner of the building. That’s been taken down but you can stand in a specific location and look at the building with your phone and see the neon sign and what the building looked like,” she explains.

The app is free for iPhone and Android users and guides you on walking tours of two “neon neighbourhoods” — the Granville strip and the Hastings-Chinatown area.

“You can hear stories from people like Tannis Ling, who revived a neon sign for her restaurant Boa Bi, Mark Brand who talks about why the sign for Save On Meats is so important, and Judy Graves who talks about the infamous but beautiful hotel signs along Hastings and the stories of the people who’s lives were illuminated beneath and behind them.”

For decades in Vancouver, city life bustled beneath a colourful canopy of neon signs; Visible City gives you a real sense of what it was like to bask in that glow.

[Deacon]

This is really cool. AR (Augmented Reality) apps for smartphones are starting to gain ground. It's great to see someone integrating AR to show the history of a location through signage. When listening to Michael Dingman speak about his neon collection:

, people really see how signage was a big key in shaping the nation (specifically neon signage). It's somewhat great and sad to see neon still holding its own next to digital/other signage in Asia (and some parts of Europe) and yet it's quickly disappearing and being replaced with LED "Neon-like" strips. There's nothing neon-like about the LED forms...

[neonandmore]

I have sharing my best Neon Signs. this is my first work hope you like..