Leveraging Technology & Content

Microsoft (where I work) and our partner Shoothill just released a great example of bringing content to life with technology, while also promoting a product (a movie in this case). To see ‘The War Horse TimeMap Journey’ and follow the fictional horse ‘Joey’ from southern England to the Western Front in France using archive material from World War One, go to: https://movies.msn.com/warhorse/map/

I consider it an ‘edutainment’ piece using Bing Maps, Deep Zoom and Azure to tell the fictional story of Joey (the horse) and his owner Albert’s journey from Devon to the trenches of WWI through the use of scans of real trench maps, aerial reconnaissance imagery of the battles (one of which shows a British attack on the German lines), historic imagery of real war horses and Calvary officers from the Dragoon Guards War Diary extracts from the beginning of the war.  BTW the project is built entirely on AJAX and has been optimized for PC, Mac and iPad. (admittedly, being a long-time Microsoft guy, I have only played with it on my Windows 7 PC)

See https://www.shoothill.com/blog/2011/12/war-horse-timemap-experience/ for more information, plus some great graphical explanations below, compliments of Rod Plummer at Shoothill.

Warhorse Journey opens:

The War Horse Gallery

War Horse Time Map

Some example content: Scans of British Battle Maps

Same place – today

Some example content: Aerial reconnaissance imagery of the battles

Movie clips