Digital Archive of Newark Architecture Goes AR

There is nothing outwardly special about the old brick building on State Street and Broadway. To the layperson, it’s just another pile of bricks near a highway entrance. Through a phone app and a camera lens, the NJIT Littman Architecture Library’s Digital Archive of Newark Architecture (DANA) will soon be able to show, in augmented reality, that the building was State Street School, Newark’s longest-running public school and home to the city’s first Black principal. 

Through a phone app and a camera lens, DANA will soon be able to show, in augmented reality, that the building was the longest-running school in Newark’s history and was home to the city’s first Black principal. 

DANA received a research award of $19,000 from the New Jersey Historical Commission in August to build an augmented reality application that can access the DANA database that consists of hundreds of archived historic photographs, maps, and architectural drawings and designs. Users will be able to point their camera at a site in Newark and the application will superimpose information from the archive over the user’s view of the real world. A second phase of the project will use Microsoft HoloLens 2, a head-mounted augmented reality display.

“Architecture is iterative. Having this kind of record to reference is helpful in understanding how buildings are built and how people interact with the architecture." - Monica Kenzie

Dr. Hyejin Hannah Kum-Biocca, an assistant professor of digital design at the School of Art + Design in the Hillier College of Architecture and Design and a former lead UX designer, is leading the development of the AR application as part of an interdisciplinary research project with computer science master’s students and digital design undergraduates. Computer science undergraduates in 2015 transferred the old DANA website to its new database with the help of a previous NJ Historical Commission grant.

“Since I started Syracuse University as a visiting professor in 2015, I continued working on AR systems for art & science education, scientific data visualization, art gallery environment, or inside the classroom,” said Dr. Kum-Biocca. “For me, the DANA project is a welcome change of context. We’re displaying a lot of information - video clips, photo & text history, and visualization to contextualize what you’re looking at.”

The AR application will immerse the user in Newark’s history like never before, whether on a phone screen or wearing VR head-mounted displays. The DANA project began in 2009 to preserve and digitize vital library archives information as a matter of convenience and technological necessity. It has since grown from a static website of pages and PDFs into a full-blown database, and is part of the Newark Design Collaborative as a resource for faculty, students, city agencies, architects and developers. 

While the archive was built primarily for academic and development use, the app is for all to enjoy, from residents to tourists. Even now, the DANA website is accessed by people across the region and the world.

“Architecture is iterative. Having this kind of record to reference is helpful in understanding how buildings are built and how people interact with the architecture,” said Monica Kenzie, the librarian at the Littman Library. “When repurposing a building or building something new in the neighborhood, it’s important to know that history and honor it.”

“It’s helpful for us because a lot of the projects from the Hillier College involve hypothetical buildings that would be in Newark or renovations of buildings,” said Kenzie. “Lots of classes are built around using that as a resource.”

“Students have long been interested in getting maps of Newark, especially in Sanborn maps, old, detailed fire insurance maps and floor plans. They’re very fragile,” said Dr. Maya Gervits, Director of the Littman Library. Graduate students routinely help do research and add photographs and other materials to the collection. “Students and faculty needed access, so we started digitizing everything. The archive always needs more information, so it’s been gradually growing since then.”

Since its inception in 2009, the development of the Digital Archive on Newark Architecture has been supported by grants from Bay and Paul Foundation, Leavens Foundation, Investors Foundation, and the New Jersey Historical Commission.m