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.

Photobomb a historical 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.

Technology

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

Results

• Website (password : Valais)

• Video

• Instagram account with the pictures taken

Project

Blue screen

Printer box

Standard box on MakerCase:

Modified for the input of paper and output of postcard:

The SVG and DXF box project files.

Data

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

Team

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