Filtering Time at a Site of Memory: Temporal Filtering Interfaces for Situated Historic Photo Exploration in Mobile Augmented Reality

Places marked by conflict carry layered pasts that are difficult to perceive on site today: structures destroyed and rebuilt, landscapes reshaped by war, traces since erased. Historical photographs document these transformations, and mobile augmented reality (AR) can return them to the locations where they were taken, letting visitors encounter a site’s conflicted history in situ. Such photographic records, however, span many decades: displaying everything at once overwhelms a handheld screen and competes with the visitor’s attention to the place itself. We present a mobile AR system with three temporal filtering interfaces – Map-Based , Temporal Distribution Filter , and a space-time-cube-inspired Temporal Lens – and two initial display conditions ( Full Display , On-Demand Display ). We evaluate the system in a mixed-design field study (N = 14) at the Wiener Prater in Vienna, whose photographic record spans 150 years of everyday park life, including the site’s destruction in 1945 and its reconstruction, combining wearable eye-tracking with workload, clutter, and engagement measures. Our results reveal that display condition impacts free exploration, attention shifted toward the spatial-temporal visualization when tasks demanded temporal comparison, and attention to the physical environment remained low throughout (7.1% of time on average). At sites of memory, this screen absorption is an ethical-design concern rather than a usability metric: keeping visitors present to a place, and not only to its screen, emerges as a central challenge for situated digital remembrance.