The makers of the augmented reality app Pivot want to create a time portal---on your phone.
The app aims to bring glimpses of history to your smartphone screen, using images tied to wherever you happen to be. Users receive notifications when they’re near a "pivot" point; raising the phone brings up an image of that place as it appeared from that vantage point decades ago.
For creators Asma Jaber and her fiancée Sami Jitan, the inspiration for the project was personal: “I wanted to create a way to let people see what my father’s village looked like in the past,” Jaber says.
Jaber’s Palestinian father lived in Nazareth and, later, in a village north of Ramallah during a period of great conflict in the region. He arrived in South Carolina in 1971 after being denied entry to the West Bank and landing in Jordan. Her father, determined to preserve his homeland in the family’s imagination, often told stories about life there and took Jaber to visit the places of his childhood. “He showed me the house where he was born, the school he went to in the old city of Jerusalem, where he hiked as a Boy Scout,” she said. “It was very powerful.” When her father died years later, Jaber felt like she not only lost a parent, but a guide to her ancestral homeland.
Jaber, a recent graduate of Harvard’s school of public policy, and Jitan started developing Pivot last spring. With help from two computer science students from Harvard and MIT, they created a prototype that won an entrepreneurship contest at the Harvard Innovation Lab, which helped them continue developing the project.
The duo hopes Pivot could become a historical preservation platform. Though Pivot initially will rely upon online archives for its media, the service hopes to create a crowd-sourced model the founders call “shoebox archiving.” The idea is to encourage people worldwide to upload old photographs and other multimedia. It will be tied to a specific GPS coordinate and vetted for accuracy.
Pivot could offer a unique way to rediscover history---and address a desire to archive that history. Jaber has heard from people in Italy, Australia, Indonesia, and throughout the US interested in preserving their homes' history.
Pivot already has exceeded its Kickstarter goal of $30,000 in a campaign that ends Saturday. The Android and iOS compatible app launch with points in historic Palestine and Boston this fall, with plans to expand to other cities quickly thereafter.
