It was in 1895 when an Italian woman, Maria Barbella, killed her lover Domenico Cataldo by slitting his throat because he didn’t want to marry her. The same year, on November 9, Michael Healy mysteriously died after an unknown person stabbed him in the eye with an umbrella. In 1856, Bartholomew Burke, an unmarried porter who worked at a shop on 378 Broadway, was found dead after his killer used sheers, a hammer, and a sword to put him down. Not a very pleasant list, right?
All these bloody scenarios took place on the streets of New York during the Victorian era. Not many know about the city’s bloody past during which the residents were simply tormented by a series of horrific violent crimes. The streets that today host glamorous shops and boutiques have once witnessed some of the city’s most grim murders.
To help people discover more about NYC’s dark past, design and technology company Firstborn created an augmented reality (AR) app titled Gruesome Gotham, through which the team aims to virtually revisit some of the most terrible slayings committed within the city’s renowned streets.
Developed using Apple’s ARKit, the app invites users to become the witness of the deadly deeds and allows them to join various horrible scenarios in the exact same spots where they actually occurred. To be virtual eyewitnesses to the crimes that frightened the New York City in the 1800s, users must download the app either from iTunes or directly from the official site.
Thrill-seekers can then successfully follow the path of the crimes by sticking to different hints included in an interactive map that pops up once the app is installed on their devices. The cartographic projection includes geolocation pins of the disturbing crimes. Viewers can gradually unlock the murder scenes by observing each assassination featured on the map.
Armed with AR technology at their hand and physically present at the crime scenes, users can visually track the torture scenarios that the victims had to endure before their death. The experience becomes even more dramatic once an ominous narrative voice enters the scene and starts explaining the killings in detail. Also, the app is accompanied by a newspaper section, where readers can learn about even more details of the murders committed on the streets of old New York.
Within the app, the Tribeca-based agency chose to feature the violent acts that happened around Firstborn’s vicinity and the bloody ones that occurred on the route of the annual Village Halloween Parade. Emily Hom, spokeswoman for the agency said that the creatives “figured if people are cheering the parade, they can download the app.”
“By recreating these frightful scenes in AR, we’ve made it so anyone can stare death in the face this Halloween,” claims the agency. The app is free to download for iPhones 6S or above and features six real crimes experiences as of now. But if the interest for macabre events keeps growing, the team says they might take into account adding other murders to the app, only to quench consumers’ ‘thirst’ for blood.
Credits:
Product: Gruesome Gotham
Agency: Firstborn