1st, N.O had the Afro Pick of Peace; now it’s a V.R slave market with digital ghosts

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‘Slave Trails’ high-tech art display marks where some slaves were sold in French Quarter

Artist Marcus Brown’s “Slavery Trails” sculptures don’t exist in the real world. But if you stand beneath the oaks on Esplanade Avenue on the edge of the French Quarter and activate your iPhone with a special QR code, a dozen eerie, digital ghosts will appear on your screen, hovering a few feet above the dusty neutral ground.

Brown's ghosts mark the spot of a former market where men, women and children were bought and sold. Like the ghosts, the long-ago slave market is invisible now. But Brown wants people to know that, sociologically anyway, it’s still there.

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The technology Brown employed is called augmented reality. On the steamy afternoon of June 20, passersby studied the instructional marker that Brown has placed on the ground beneath an official historic marker describing the slave trade, and coaxed their phones to summon the ghosts. They discovered you can see them from all directions, and –disconcertingly — you can walk right through them. More disconcerting still is the fact that, from certain angles, the pink figures seem to be hanging from the trees

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