Poetic Places, augmented reality with literature

"Augmented reality" - the expression on everyone's lips this summer, thanks to Pokémon Go where players swarm on their discovery tour of the urban environment. However, other apps to explore the city have also been invented. Poetic Places is London's response.



Poetic Places is a free app for Android and iOS utilising geolocation services to help users to encounter poems and literature in the locations described. Poetic Places was created by Sarah Cole (TIME/IMAGE) whilst Creative Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the British Library in London and presently focuses on London-based content.





If you activate the app, as you walk around London push notifications tell you when you stumble upon a place depicted in literature, so you can go hunting for poetry and visual period pieces as a valid alternative to Pokémon Go. That App developed with Google may locate points of interest in a city and in country towns (if it's one of the places the Google Car has been to) but it doesn't give you any other information that might put a monument or an infrastructure into some kind of context.



And this is exactly what Poetic Places gives users - a new perception of a place through the combination of writings and paintings and sounds so these places mean more than they do alone. Expanding the connotations of squares and architecture by providing material archived under Creative Commons, which can be used and copied for non-commercial purposes, to give new, unexpected literary and artistic emotions in our daily routine. 



Because although she started from the literary aspect to denote a given place, Sarah Cole realised the huge impact of illustrations, particularly when taken away from their archives and slotted into a new, poetic, digital context, also providing museum and library collections with an opportunity for visibility.



Poetic Places presently focuses on London-based content as a pilot project to be supplemented with other material. Let's hope that the scope of these poetic experiences is widened to cover locations across the UK and the rest of the world.

Christiane Bürklein

Find out more:
http://www.poeticplaces.uk/
Images: Courtesy of PoeticPlaces