Adrian Jones uses AR to bring Pittsburgh's erased Black history back to the streets

There's a stretch of South Highland Avenue in Pittsburgh's East Liberty where you'd walk past without a second look. Today it reads as ordinary street - storefronts, sidewalk, traffic. Nothing on the block tells you what once stood here.

In the early 1960s, this was the office of the Pittsburgh Friends of COFO. COFO - the Council of Federated Organizations - was the coalition that brought SNCC, CORE, the NAACP and others together to register Black voters across the segregated South. The people who gathered in this East Liberty storefront were part of the northern support network behind that work - raising money, awareness, and solidarity for a freedom struggle unfolding hundreds of miles away.

Like much of Black East Liberty, the building and the history inside it slipped out of the streetscape - urban renewal, redevelopment, and time did the rest. Looking Glass puts it back. Stand on the block, raise your phone, and the past returns to the exact spot where it happened.

Adrian Jones is a creative technologist and archivist. He moved to Pittsburgh in 2017 and started noticing things - developers buying up neighbourhoods, long-standing Black residents getting pushed out, a Whole Foods where an apartment building used to be, a luxury complex where a small business stood for fifty years.

He kept digging and stories kept showing up, and the uncomfortable part was that none of it was new - the same thing had been happening in Pittsburgh for over a century.

In 2021, he started building Looking Glass. The idea: map those stories to the exact GPS coordinates where they happened. You walk to a spot, open the app, and the past shows up on top of the present. Photos, oral histories, 3D sculptures anchored to the original site.

It took about a year and a half, working part-time between grant cycles. Adrian isn't coding full-time - he's juggling research, community relationships, and fundraising alongside the build. But the first working AR demo came together faster than he thought it would.

"It didn't take much work to get a hello world kind of augmented reality experience," he says. "And that was really satisfying. Most of the work was on the React Native part - getting the app up and running, getting the package wired up. But once the ViroReact component was initialised, it was like, oh, this is actually pretty straightforward."

The hard parts had nothing to do with ViroReact. Adrian had never worked in 3D before. His models looked wrong inside the app and he couldn't figure out why. Turns out he hadn't set up lighting in the scene. "I might have gotten to that realisation quicker if I had a 3D background where it's just like, oh yeah, you need to have lights in your scene," he says. "But the documentation, being able to see other examples of scenes that people have built - all of that was really helpful."

Right now he's working on making the existing app better. More stories across the city, geospatial anchors that pin AR content to real GPS coordinates, and more interaction with the 3D objects in each scene.