Join our campaign on Kickstarter to help us develop our new augmented-reality mobile app, Finding Sacred Ground!

Augmented reality, a technology for mobile devices that superimposes images and audio over the user’s actual surroundings, is one of the hottest new developments in mobile media. Developers are scrambling to design new augmented-reality applications using this amazingly immersive, interactive tool for entertainment, education, social media … you name it.

But at last year’s Bay Area Video Coalition (BAVC) Producers’ Institute for New Media, along with our friends at the National Park Service, as well as Paige Saez and Anselm Hook of Maker Lab, we looked at this new media technology and asked a different question: Can a hyper-modern, cutting-edge augmented-reality application also help protect ancient indigenous sacred sites — and inspire reverence for the natural world?

The app we conceptualized at BAVC, called Finding Sacred Ground, will reveal the hidden indigenous history of many well-known tourist attractions and help users explore alternative perspectives on our relationship with the earth. The first phase in our app’s development is to produce a working audio-only pilot at Devils Tower National Monument. We have the concept and the media, and now all we need is $4,500 to pay for a mobile phone application developer.  We have just launched a campaign on the crowd-funding website Kickstarter to raise the necessary funds, and for our campaign (and our app) to be successful, we need your help!

Please check out our Kickstarter campaign and spread the word to your friends, family and colleagues and contribute to making this fantastic project a reality. As for all projects on Kickstarter, we must meet or exceed our funding goal by the deadline (Saturday, November 12) for us to be able to keep any of the pledges we receive, so getting the word out is key!

Thanks very much for your help. Any size donation will make a difference.

Take me to Kickstarter now!