Deep History Coast

The Client

North Norfolk District Council

The Brief

To create a fun AR trail app along the Deep History Coast to encourage visitors to get out and explore this 35 km stretch of the North Norfolk Coastline from Weybourne to Cart Gap, whose rapid erosion by the sea has revealed incredible evidence of early man and the exotic creatures that once roamed the UK.

We created a GPS triggered trail app that allowed visitors to meet life-size Hominins and animals from the Pleistocene period as they walk the Deep History Coastline. Whilst walking the trails they can collect and unlock location-specific evidence and information about the coastline present and past as they walked along the Norfolk Coast path. This Information was layered to enable visitors of all interest levels and ages find and learn something new about the place they were visiting. The map also incorporates details of local businesses that appear relative to the user to guide them to suitable places to eat, drink, stay or explore.

With Augmented Reality (AR) we recreated the landscape of over 750,000 years ago, with the river Thames running through land stretching across to northern Europe. These landscapes were populated with the creatures that once roamed there, among them mammoth, Rhino, scimitar toothed cats and early man, so that visitors could get a real sense of how the area would have once looked. All the AR characters and creatures were stored in a virtual collector’s journal to allow visitors to place them anywhere they liked to create their own prehistoric scene after their visit.

For a bit of fun, we introduced virtual hominin tour guides at each of 11 gateway monoliths positioned along the coast, visitors could trigger the virtual hominin family to appear and offer tips on what to see and do along each coastal stretch. At two sites where mammoth bones have been unearthed, visitors could complete the Mammoth Task game, collecting geo-located virtual mammoth bones to build their own Steppe Mammoth.

A walk along this coastline is almost certain to reveal an array of different fossils and the local museums are keen to discover what people have unearthed. We incorporated a fossil and flint-finder section to help visitors identify and record any interesting discoveries as they explore.

The ever-changing landscape presents many challenges, not least the sudden disappearance of a walking route at any point along the trail! We incorporated a content management system that would allow the client to update routes, change content locations and issue alerts to warn of any hazards, but also to tell visitors about local events taking place. Local business information was updated in the same way.