Hamm Turns 800 Years of History Into a Walkable Digital Experience

Hamm is inviting residents and visitors to see the city in a new way — not only as it stands today, but as it once was. With the launch of the free “Heimat Hamm” app, the city has turned its historic center into an interactive journey through time, using augmented reality to connect modern streets, squares and landmarks with stories from Hamm’s past.

Presented on Monday, 15 June 2026, the app is part of Hamm’s wider city anniversary year and offers a digital walking tour through the Innenstadt. Instead of placing history behind museum glass or limiting it to printed guidebooks, “Heimat Hamm” brings historical places, vanished buildings and local stories directly onto the smartphone screen.

The result is a city tour designed for the digital age: accessible, flexible, educational and playful. For Hamm, a city marking 800 years of history, the project is more than a technical innovation. It is also a statement about memory, identity and the future of local culture.

A City Anniversary Becomes a Digital Time Machine

The launch of “Heimat Hamm” comes during a symbolic year for the city. Hamm’s 800th anniversary has provided the occasion to revisit the city’s origins, its historic center and the people and places that have shaped its development.

At the heart of the project is a simple idea: users should be able to walk through today’s Hamm while seeing traces of yesterday’s Hamm. Through augmented reality, digital content is layered over the real cityscape. On a mobile device, users can view historical places and buildings that no longer exist, bringing lost parts of the city back into public view.

The city introduced the app on the Hammer Marktplatz, one of the most fitting locations for a project rooted in local history. The marketplace lies in the historic core of Hamm and remains closely linked to the city’s identity. During the presentation, Mayor Marc Herter and NRW Minister Ina Scharrenbach were among those present.

Herter framed the app as an invitation to experience Hamm’s history in a new and inclusive way.

“Laden Sie die App Hamm herunter – und erleben sie unsere Stadtgeschichte auf eine ganz neue, spannende Weise – digital, interaktiv und für alle zugänglich” – Marc Herter, Oberbürgermeister der Stadt Hamm

That message captures the central ambition of the project: history should not feel distant, static or reserved for specialists. It should be visible, approachable and open to everyone.

How “Heimat Hamm” Works

“Heimat Hamm” is built around a free digital city tour through Hamm’s Innenstadt. Users download the app, visit the participating locations and use their smartphone or tablet to access historical content at each station.

The experience is powered by augmented reality, often abbreviated as AR. In practical terms, AR allows digital objects, graphics, information and storytelling elements to appear on the screen while users are physically standing in the real environment. Present and past merge in real time.

The route includes eleven historical locations and one additional surprise station. All points are located in the city center, which is described as the historic origin of Hamm. The full tour is designed to take around two hours, although the app does not force users to follow a strict timetable.

There is no fixed starting point. The order of the stations is freely selectable, allowing people to explore according to their own pace and curiosity. At the locations, floor markers in the form of QR codes permanently identify the historical reference points. Users scan the code and begin the digital journey into the past.

For the best experience, users are encouraged to have enough battery power and to use headphones. This helps make the audio, storytelling and interactive elements easier to follow while moving through the city.

From the Hauptbahnhof to Königstraße

The route combines familiar landmarks with lesser-known historical places. Among the recognizable points is the Hauptbahnhof, one of the city’s prominent urban locations. But the tour also leads users to quieter places such as Königstraße, where a pub once served as a meeting place for widows of Radbod.

That mix of well-known and overlooked sites is important. A city’s history is not made only by monumental buildings or famous public spaces. It also lives in streets, meeting points, memories and social stories that may not be obvious to passersby.

By using AR to make these places visible, “Heimat Hamm” helps users understand the city as a layered environment. A modern street may contain traces of community life, labor history, urban change or cultural memory. The app gives those traces a form that can be seen and experienced.

In that sense, Hamm becomes what one description of the project calls a walkable history book. The city center is not treated simply as a shopping district or transport hub, but as a living archive.

Avatars Make the Tour More Accessible

A major feature of “Heimat Hamm” is the use of three guiding avatars: Grete, Toni and Klippi. They are designed to make the tour feel more personal and accessible for different audiences.

Grete serves as an adult avatar, while Toni is aimed at younger users. Klippi offers an “Audio-Only” mode, intended as an alternative for people with visual impairments.

This design choice shows that the app is not only a technology project but also an accessibility project. The city wants the experience to reach a broad audience, including long-time residents, newcomers, guests, families, school classes and tourists.

The inclusion of a child-oriented avatar is especially relevant for educational use. School groups can engage with Hamm’s history in a format closer to the digital media environments many young people already know. Rather than reading a plaque or listening passively to a lecture, students can move through real places, interact with the app and connect historical material to the city around them.

Minigames Bring 800 Years of History to Life

The app does not rely only on narration and visual overlays. It also includes minigames that allow users to engage more actively with Hamm’s 800 years of history.

Each historical location contains a two-part gamification model, including a collecting game and several minigames connected to the respective site. Users can test their knowledge, discover details and deepen their understanding of the location they are visiting.

This approach reflects a wider shift in cultural education. Museums, archives and cities increasingly use interactive formats to make history more engaging, especially for younger audiences. Gamification can turn a city tour from a passive walk into an active process of discovery.

For Hamm, this matters because the app is meant to be low-threshold and free. It does not require specialized historical knowledge before starting. Users can learn by exploring, playing and noticing the city differently.

A Broad Project With Many Partners

“Heimat Hamm” is not a small standalone app built in isolation. It is a major city project with a total volume of 430,000 euros.

The project is supported significantly through the “Heimat-Zeugnis” funding program of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. The presence of NRW Minister Ina Scharrenbach at the launch underlined the project’s wider regional significance.

Several municipal departments and cultural institutions were involved. These included the Stadtarchiv, the Gustav-Lübcke-Museum, the Büro für Kultur und Tourismus, the Medienzentrum Hamm and other city departments.

Additional support came from areas including geodata management, organizational development, IT and digitalization, civil engineering and procurement. The app is also described as a central flagship project of Digitales:Hamm, the city’s digitalization strategy.

The technical implementation was handled by wezit transmedia solutions, a German-French company responsible for programming and developing the app. Branding and strategic marketing were handled by kollarneuber creative minds.

This wide network of contributors reflects the complexity of the project. To make a historical AR tour work, a city needs more than software. It needs archival research, cultural interpretation, urban planning, accessibility thinking, design, technical infrastructure and public communication.

Why the App Matters for Hamm

“Heimat Hamm” arrives at a time when cities are rethinking how they present local identity. Urban history is no longer confined to museums, memorials or official tours. Digital tools now allow cities to turn public space itself into an educational platform.

For Hamm, the app strengthens the relationship between residents and their city. Long-time Hammerinnen and Hammer may rediscover familiar streets. New residents can better understand the place they now call home. Tourists can experience the city beyond surface-level sightseeing. Families and school classes can use the app as an educational activity.

The project also gives Hamm a modern cultural profile. By using augmented reality, the city positions itself as a place willing to combine heritage with innovation. That is especially meaningful during an anniversary year: the city is not only looking back, but also asking how history can inform the future.

Herter expressed that broader purpose clearly.

“Im Jahr unseres Stadtjubiläums machen wir so die Geschichte Hamms erlebbar und schaffen zugleich Raum für die Auseinandersetzung mit unserer gemeinsamen Zukunft” – Marc Herter, Oberbürgermeister der Stadt Hamm

The wording points to a key idea: history is not just remembrance. It is a resource for thinking about what comes next.

A Practical Guide for Users

The app is designed to be simple to use. Users download “Heimat Hamm” for free from the app store of their operating system, go to one of the marked stations in the city center and scan the QR code at the location.

Once the scan is complete, the app opens the historical content for that place. Users can explore the AR elements, listen to the guide, play minigames and then move on to the next nearby station.

Because the route is flexible, it can be completed in one session or experienced more casually. A visitor with two hours can follow the full tour. A resident passing through the city center can try one or two locations and return later. A school class can focus on selected stops that fit a lesson.

This flexibility is one of the app’s strongest qualities. It respects the way people actually move through cities: not always in a fixed order, not always with unlimited time and not always with the same interests.

Hamm as a Model for Digital Local History

The significance of “Heimat Hamm” extends beyond one city app. It reflects a broader trend in how municipalities can use digital tools to preserve and communicate local heritage.

Many cities face the same challenge: important parts of their history are invisible in the modern streetscape. Buildings have disappeared, communities have changed and younger generations may not know the stories behind ordinary-looking places. Augmented reality offers one way to restore visibility without physically reconstructing the past.

For Hamm, the app also creates a bridge between archives and everyday life. Materials and knowledge held by institutions such as the Stadtarchiv and Gustav-Lübcke-Museum can reach people directly where history happened.

That makes the project culturally valuable. It does not replace museums or archives; it extends them into the city.

A New Way to Walk Through the Past

“Heimat Hamm” turns the Innenstadt into an open-air digital exhibition. Its success will depend not only on the technology but also on how residents, schools, families and visitors adopt it.

The project has several strengths: it is free, accessible, interactive and rooted in local history. It offers a two-hour tour but allows flexible exploration. It combines major landmarks with hidden stories. It uses avatars and minigames to reach different audiences. And it arrives at a moment when Hamm is actively reflecting on 800 years of urban identity.

In the end, the app’s importance lies in the way it changes attention. A familiar street becomes a historical scene. A marketplace becomes a portal. A vanished building becomes visible again. The city center becomes not only a place to pass through, but a place to read, hear, explore and question.

For Hamm, that is a powerful anniversary gift: a digital route into the past, built to help residents and visitors imagine the city’s future.