This free App, developed and presented by NPO; Earth Literacy Program (director, Shinichi
Takemura, Professor at Kyoto University of Art and Design), is to visualize various aspect
of our planet such as continental drift in 500 million years, the global migration of Sapiens
over the last 50 thousand years, global warming simulations in this century, etc. with a live
3D globe on your palm.
Although this program is developed basically as an AR functionalities for Takeo Desk Diary
2021 “The Earth Chronicle” which Prof. Takemura is in charge of its concept design, you
can enjoy these contents independently on your smartphone, without having the Desk
Diary.
Humanity is now living through a major watershed moment in history. Each action taken by each of us constitutes a new breath of this planet, the choices and behavior of us living today form another layer in the history of the Earth’s evolution.
So, in this Desk Diary, we wanted to provide an expansive overview of our age through a MULTI-LAYERED chronological landscape, ranging from Earth history to the history of life, humanity, and our future in relation to pandemic and climate change. It measures our age using a multidimensional chronological scale that shaves off one zero each month—5 billion years, 500 million years, 50 million years, 5 million years,… on each page from January to December.
The AR function is designed to enhance users’ experience of this Earth Chronicle. On each page of the calendar, by downloading this app onto your smartphone and hovering your device over the page, you can view related phenomena such as continental drift, migration of Sapiens, and global warming simulations in the future with a live 3D globe (not unlike a pop-up picture book), or dynamically fluctuating graph pattern which traces change in temperature and climate during each period.
(The reader of the Diary can download the app from QR code the first page.)
Electronic media should complement and expand upon the flat written page that has been refined over the course of thousands of years of civilization, rather than replace them. Living during the interim period between old and new media, our generation is responsible for the development of the future of paper media, a future in which books are upgraded in order to provide multiple doors to a broader information space with a more expansive sensory experience. As a modest step in that direction, this book has been equipped with a mechanism for linking to a digital space.