The Pointe Du Hoc AR Joint Capstone team debuted their project at the National World War II Museum in New Orleans, Louisiana. The Project is an Augmented Reality App detailing the Assault on the Guns at Pointe Du Hoc on Jun 6th, 1944 as part of the D-Day landings in Normandy. The day coincided with Louisiana History Day at the museum, which is the state history competition, where over 250 students and families plus the general public attended. COL Ty Seidule and other advisors to the capstone attended the trip. There were nine cadets that worked on the project across four academic disciplines (History, Systems Engineering (SE), Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), and Geography and Environmental Engineering (GENE)).
The project manager was Jacob Paniccia (SE), who kept the project on schedule and managed the system requirements. The app was created with a Drone Camera and Photogrammetry to create a 3D mesh of the terrain at Pointe Du Hoc in Normandy. Through the work of Jake Marchillo (GENE) who rendered over 100 million points of data, and Hannah Whisnant, Jesse Austel, Andre Hufnagel, Andre Michell, and Brad Cho (EECS), they overlaid the 3D terrain on a 2D map using the phone's camera that gives the user the ability to interact with the terrain. History cadets Karol Wegrzyn and Pete Worrall researched the attack at the National Archives and created a narrative story arc that the EECS cadets overlaid on the terrain, creating an interactive and immersive experience that can be used as an individual or as a class lead by an instructor through an intuitive user interface. The story follows LTC James E Rudder and the men of 2nd and 5th Ranger Battalion's seaborne assault on six 155mm guns emplaced in concrete casemates, situated between Utah and Omaha Beach.