An app for Virginia Beach city history

Picture this:

You're sand-covered and sunburnt, feet in the ocean at 17th Street. You get a sudden urge to know more about the scanty clothing covering those around you - some well, some not so well. So you reach for your phone.

Swimsuit history on Virginia Beach? Yep, there's an app for that.

According to an online smartphone application called Tagwhat, swimsuits in the early 1900s were tailor-made. And in the 1930s, a local seamstress made suits for the Virginia Beach Lifesaving Service every season.

Tagwhat is a location-based app for people with smartphones that have Internet or 3G network service. Open the program, tap "use current location" on the menu bar and a viewfinder-type screen pops up that shows your surroundings with tags linking to photos and stories of nearby areas.

A GPS map on the bottom left side of the screen highlights stories as red dots, so you can walk to different areas to find them.

The app currently features nine fairly large cities across the U.S., such as Portland, Ore.; Boulder, Colo.; Austin, Texas; and, of course, Virginia Beach.

Freelance writers and Tagwhat employees created most of the stories for each city, said Dave Elchoness, CEO and cofounder of Tagwhat. Nicole McGee, Virginia Beach's emerging technologies librarian, and Cynthia Hart, the virtual librarian, took over the task for Virginia Beach.

"The library's kind of like an iceberg; we have all this cool stuff that nobody ever sees or knows how to get to," Hart said. "What we're trying to do now is tell people, and we're using this augmented reality app to do it."

Librarians actively collect memorabilia and stories from local residents. Some of the stored information turned into a coffee table book about local history ("The Beach," available for $8.95 at local libraries), and Hart is turning more into interactive stories on Tagwhat. She has a list of about 100 stories to create for the app, and the library has 10 stories posted now, she said.

You can click on a story about the annual Pungo strawberry festival and a story about a movie scene from "Hearts of Atlantis" filmed with Cape Henry's two lighthouses in the background.

There's also a story detailing the history of the Boardwalk: It was constructed in 1888 to connect Princess Anne Hotel on 16th Street with the Arlington Hotel on 12th Street, and before it was built people would cross the sand on planks.

Hart wants to add six more stories about movies with Virginia Beach ties, stories about local communities like Seatack and Burton Station, and stories about famous chefs and restaurants.

The current Tagwhat stories are models for when the app goes public sometime next month, Elchoness said. Everyone can download it now, but only approved users can post; soon, everyone who downloads the app will also be able to create stories for locations.

Eventually users will also be able to access many more locations. Elchoness wants locals and visitors to contribute their own stories to the app, but learned the hard way with an earlier version that many people don't know what to write in location-based posts.

"We got a lot of tags that were like, 'This is where my mom lives,' or 'This is my school,'" Elchoness said. "Those alone offer very little interest to most people."

Elchoness hopes the dozens of stories already in the app will guide new users so posts move beyond, "This is where I live," to highlight things to see and know about a place like Virginia Beach.

"Lots of people have digital archives that they would love to re-tool for another purpose or expand into other platforms, but they just don't know quite what to do with it," Elchoness said. "This is really a neat way to put these hidden stories of Virginia Beach on display."

Ruth Moon, 222-5130, ruth.moon@pilotonline.com