London Lens

An AR experience revealing the hidden colonial history of the City of London:

London Lens peels back the surface of London’s financial district to reveal the hidden colonial histories that lie beneath.

Inspired by how the urban environment both conceals and reveals the past - and the public debate on colonial monuments - London Lens turns the urban environment into a living repository of history. It harnesses the unique storytelling power of the City of London's 'Square Mile' as birthplace of the financial institutions that have come to shape our reality.

Using VPS, the user is guided to four locations corresponding to four stages of colonialism in London - and the world. Once localized, audio triggers and virtual objects defined in remote authoring are spawned through user interaction with relevant building elements. Niantic’s human-scale augmented reality technologies allow us to 're-present’ London's hidden colonial past. By placing its buildings centre-stage, the City of London becomes a storytelling space that the user explores with their body. The route between locations invites users to rediscover tourist sites through the lens of the City’s colonial past.

Concluding at the London Stock Exchange, London Lens reveals how this hidden past structures our world today. It uses augmented reality elements to make visible the obscure operation of financial markets, by revealing real-world effects at their real-world location. London Lens explores the potential of AR as a kind of digital grafitti or ‘tagging’, annotating the buildings of the City to reveal its colonial legacy and memorializing the lives sacrificed to the idea of unbounded economic growth.