mutable postcards

In these days there are millions of pictures already taken. Especially pictures showing places of touristic interest. Mutable postcards takes advantage of this large picture pool and rethinks the good old picture postcard.

When you go on a trip e.g. to Berlin and have the wish to show your family and friends at home where you have been you now can send a mutable postcard. Normal postcards are a non-mutable print product. Most of them show one place and one point of view at a time. Sometimes the editors put together a few pictures even from different points in time. Mutable postcards brings this idea to a new quality. A mutable postcard itself only shows a black and white pattern and the name of the landmark connected with the card. If you go online, start the mutable postcards webapp and hold the in front of your webcam, the postcard reveals its full information. The webapp maps different pictures of the connected landmark on the postcard and shows them on the two-dimensional surface in three-dimensional space. The pictures are randomly taken from flickr, so you will get multiple viewpoints and pictures from varying points in time or even pictures showing events of the day.

Mutable postcards is built in flash using theFLARManager (for FLARToolkit) to provide augmented reality. Whenever a pattern on one of the postcards is detected the application starts to search for the associated tags on flickr. Then it takes a found image from flickr and maps it on the postcard.

A project by Stefan Höderath and Tim Horntrich
University of Arts, Berlin – Digital Class