TimeGazer

Welcome to TimeGazer: A time-traveling photo booth enabling you to send greetings from historical postcards.

Based on the wonderful “Postcards from Valais (1890 - 1950)” dataset, consisting of nearly 4000 historic postcards of Valais, we create a prototype for Mixed-Reality photo booth.

Choose a historic postcard as a background and a person will be style-transferred virtually onto the postcard.

A photo booth for time traveling
send greetings from the poster
virtually enter the historical postcard

Mockup of the process.

Based on the wonderful “Postcards from Valais (1890 - 1950)” dataset, consisting of nearly 4000 historic postcards of Valais, we create a prototype for Mixed-Reality photo booth. One can choose a historic postcard as a background and a person will be style-transferred virtually onto the postcard.

Potentially with VR-trackerified things to add choosable objects virtually into the scene.

This project is roughly based on a project from last year, which resulted in an active research project at Databases and Information Systems group of the University of Basel: VIRTUE. Hence, we use a similar setup:

• HTC Vive Pro VR-Headset
• Unity
• Style Transfer - Styling Images with Convolutional Neural Networks

• Website (password : Valais)
• Video
• Instagram account with the pictures taken

Standard box on MakerCase:

Modified for the input of paper and output of postcard:

The SVG and DXF box project files.

Quote from the data introduction page:

A collection of 3900 postcards from Valais. Some highlights are churches, cable cars, landscapes and traditional costumes.
Source: Musées cantonaux du Valais – Musée d’histoire

• https://opendata.swiss/en/dataset/postcards-from-valais-1890-1950

• Dr. Ivan Giangreco
• Dr. Johann Roduit
• Lionel Walter
• Loris Sauter
• Luca Palli
• Ralph Gasser