The app “Geheim!“ is a virtual tour on the campus of TU Dresden. It enables users to visit various places that were monitored, investigated and surveilled by Stasi as late as 1989. These places and their stories can be explored by finding histocaches.
The histocaches contain stories from the files of the Stasi, associated with buildings and places on the campus of TU Dresden. The app provides insights into these files ‒ outside the Archives, at the scene where they happened. Augmented reality revives the historic views of these places.
The stories tell of the monitoring and protection of sensitive research areas like nuclear physics, but also the surveillance of everyday student life in dormitories and clubs. They can highlight only small parts of the Stasi surveillance system, which kept evolving over the 40 years of existence of the GDR.
"Geheim!" is a joint project of the Federal Archives and the Stasi Records Archive, the Chair of Computer Graphics and Visualization at TU Dresden and the University Archive of the TU Dresden.
The app was developed by students, doing a complex lab project at the Chair of Computer Graphics and Visualization. Research and curating was done by the Stasi Records Archive Dresden. The University Archive Dresden contributed the historic photographs used in AR mode as well as additional background information.
