There’s something profound about seeing such stark wartime destruction overlaid upon the modern banality. If these were viewed in an AR modality they’d be a great example of what Guven et al coined “situated media”.  Our team has done a bit of work around this general area, and for me personally, still images like this are best viewed in “augmented virtuality” - shown embedded in a virtual mirror of the world like Google’s Streetview, where the images can be aligned correctly, and the viewpoint is always correct.  It seems too burdensome to ask a user to align their actual viewpoint to the historical camera’s origin.  This is the main limitation of historical AR tours: we have plenty of flat photos that don’t work very well in this particular modality (AR), so we need to hire designers to create new content which works better, but doesn’t have the same authenticity.  Side-stepping to augmented virtuality allows the old and new media to mesh more eloquently.  Ancient sites don’t have this original/new-media conflict, so projects to represent them have started with a clean-slate, and new media types like the Liestol’s “situated simulation” are arising.

Who knows what the future holds: 3D capture or 3D reconstruction from a clever set of stills would allow us to create scenes with depth we could insert into an AR view in a more compelling way.  Let’s hope it’s not vignettes from WW III.