Seeing and knowing Titanic Belfast using augmented reality: an auto-ethnographic view

This paper brings together auto-ethnographic and participatory research to investigate how the practice of vision constructed through a locative-based augmented reality (AR) browser creates and reveals values and meanings connected to geographies of the place. Leveraging the potential of the collective cultural consciousness formed by the legacy of Titanic, the author has developed an AR browser that layers historic photographs of Titanic with the modern day view of the Belfast shipyard in which the ship was built, to investigate the narrative logic of what is seen and understood through the AR browser. This paper seeks to first show the experience of the AR construction using an authorial voice, enabling the reader to enter the subjective world of the author’s experience, and then tell of the experience using a broad framework of visual cultures discourse, thus enabling the narrative fidelity of the subjective experience to have reached beyond that of a description of what is seen and felt. Using this methodology, the paper identifies the affordances and constraints of the AR image in those situations where what is seen via AR technologies contributes to what is known of the cultural symbolism and value of the place.