There’s something happening here/What it is, ain’t exactly clear… But it’s gonna get interesting.
Membit is a geolocative photo sharing app that allows pictures to be placed and viewed in the exact location they were captured.
When you make a membit, you leave an image in place for other Membit users to find and enjoy. With Membit, you can share the past of a place with the present, or share the present of a place with the future.
I’m reminded of various interesting “rephotography” projects that juxtapose the past with the present. Those seem not to have moved beyond novelty—but perhaps this could? (Or maybe it’ll just induce vemödalen.) Check it out:
[Vimeo]
So could you take, say, a 3000 picture catalog from a local historical society and have some magic AI line them all up for you?
For future historians will have it so easy, since the pictures are geo-tagged & face detected. Maybe.
@J. Peterson, there’s no magic AI yet but racing into the breach come history nerds… it turns out its really kind of a fun puzzle (for the right kind of nerd, me for example) to figure out exactly what point of view some photo from the past was taken from. The cool part is with membit, once that nerd has done his or her work, everyone who comes after them gets to benefit from that work. All they have to do is line up a picture of what’s there now, which is pretty easy, to see what was once there. https://vimeo.com/184711977
Using historical imagery to power walking tours of cities seems very promising! Team up with Detour, maybe?