Work-in-Progress—Augmented Reality at Scale: Using Physical Dimensionality of Spaces to Our Advantage!

A behemoth painting measuring 49 feet high and 358 feet in length, the Battle of Atlanta Cyclorama exhibits opened to the public at the Atlanta History Center on February 22, 2019, fully restored to its original form as painted by the artists of the American Panorama Company in the 1880s. The Cyclorama is an immersive experience depicting the battlefield at approximately 4:45 p.m., July 22, 1864. The goal of our application is to enable easy identification and illustration of significant points-of-interests (POIs) embedded in the painting as the artists originally intended without obscuring the illusion of hovering above the battle field from an abstract perspective. This work in progress paper details a novel approach to develop an Augmented Reality (AR) experience at scale to incorporate real-world museum exhibits to treat as AR markers as a whole. It also describes the enduring process of keeping a low footprint on hardware configuration to maximize accessibility and thus empowering public scholarship in the field.