Upptäck historien (Discover the History)
Discover the history is one of three apps under the auspices of the Stockholm County Museum. The museum is part of Region Stockholm and has a digital mission. The purpose of the app is to create interesting content that also functions as a platform to make the county’s cultural and historical sites available. The content is produced in collaboration with the county’s municipalities.
Since the launch in September 2020, the content has grown from one to as many as 30 guided tours with quizzes, games and Augmented Reality.
Challenge
Stockholm County Museum wanted a tool to highlight the county’s many culturally and historically interesting places. Therefore, they sought a platform for mediation where they could gather different types of information about the many locations as a way to help the county’s municipalities reach out with their unique stories.
They wanted to create an app that was both informative, entertaining and easy to use for both administrators and target audiences.
Solution
Prior to the launch of the app in September 2020, OnSpotStory built a guide app with standard functionality. The app’s first guide; Cultural History Along the Track consisted of stories with pictures, audio tracks and short film clips about places of interest along the commuter train tracks.
Since 2020, Stockholm County Museum, in collaboration with the municipalities, has added many more guides. Today there are 30 different guided tours about medieval churches, Swedish-Finnish stories, castle and manor environments and rune stones.
To make the content even more engaging and entertaining, several guides also have a quiz question and on a couple of guides users can collect points and go from “passenger” to “train driver” by visiting the locations and answering sometimes quite clever quiz questions correctly.
By the summer of 2021, a first guide with Augmented Reality was launched. In this pilot, the user can find out more about three of Huddinge municipality’s runestones by scanning each stone. The runic inscription, which is often quite poorly visible, is then filled in with glowing red paint and read out, first in Old Norse and then translated into modern Swedish. And then an archaeologist appears and tells us more about the meaning of the stone and the runes.
The Discover the History app is in constant development and in 2022 it will be expanded with more AR and other exciting content.
One of the advantages of the app is that we can create something beyond a digital version of a sign. With different types of media content and AR, we can give the story new dimensions.
Daniel Sahlén, Archeologist, Stockholms County Museum
