Augmented Asbury gives visitors 3-D view of former Asbury Park boardwalk

ASBURY PARK — On a recent visit to Asbury Park for a wedding, Rick Clark walked along the boardwalk trying to picture where the Palace Amusements building used to stand.

Living in Plainfield but originally from New York, Clark said he’d never been to Asbury Park and wanted to see its remaining icons.

Then Clark ran into Ed Johnston and Mike Richison, who showed him that with a cell phone and a special app, he could get a 3-D view of some of the most famous sites that have long since disappeared from along on the boardwalk.

“We’re kind of creating these virtual architectures from memory,” said Johnston, a professor at Kean University. “They’re placeholders for people to remember these things and share their memories.”

Johnston, Richison and Richison’s fiancée Marina Vujnovic developed the content over the past two years collecting as much information as possible about the buildings and where they once stood.

All three, in their 30s, are not from New Jersey and had no firsthand recollections of Asbury Park’s storied past.

“We’re all transplants. We heard a lot of stories. We didn’t have the connection from our childhoods,” said Richison, a professor at Monmouth University.

Johnston was in charge of the 3-D modeling, Richison was the graphic designer and Vujnovic pulled together the history.

Richison and Vujnovic, also a professor at Monmouth Univesity, first got the idea for the augmented tour after working on a digital reconstruction of the original carousel that used to be inside the Carousel House.

Users of their virtual reality tour download the free mobile app Junaio to their cell phone or tablet with a wireless connection. They can either search the app for “Augmented Asbury Park” or use the app to scan the special QR code on free postcards that are distributed on the boardwalk. Showing up on the screens of the mobile devices will be markers indicating where the 3-D images will appear.

There’s the Monterey Hotel, built in 1912 on the north end of the oceanfront that took up an entire block. Or the Seventh Avenue Pavilion, a wooden structure built in 1905 and nicknamed the birdcage that sat right on the beach. They can see the luxury liner SS Morro Castle as it sat burning after it ran aground powerless near Convention Hall in 1934. There’s a life-size sky ride that ran for several blocks on the boardwalk until around the 1970s. It also depicts the boardwalk’s famous natatorium, a building constructed around 1912 enclosing a saltwater swimming pool.

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Richison said one of the participants in the weekly tours he and Johnston gave last month told them she swam in the natatorium as late as the 1950s or 60s.

“Once in a while you meet someone who has a first-hand connection but some of these sites are too old,’ Johnston said.

And the trio couldn’t omit some of the most famous buildings on and off the boardwalk – the Casino, the Carousel House and Palace Amusements.

Johnston designed the images from photographs and post cards of the popular sites. Some of the images – such as the Morro Castle – look more detailed because of the abundance of photographs available for Johnston to work with. The sky ride isn’t nearly as detailed because of the dearth of photos and postcards of it.

Don Stine, president of the Asbury Park Historical Society, said the app uses “cutting edge technology to promote the history of Asbury Park.”

“It doesn’t replace the original buildings or memories, but it certainly helps people remember or understand what was there once and appreciate the different historical aspects of Asbury over the years,” Stine said.

Walking with other wedding attendees, Clark was trying to imagine what the Casino building, now a fraction of the size and a shell of its former gargantuan structure, looked like in its heyday.

Richison took out his tablet, pointed it at the remains of the Casino, and up on the screen popped an image of the building as it looked after its construction in 1932.

“I was hoping I would see a little bit of it,” Clark said. “To have the visual and to have some historic review behind it, it’s good.”

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