Thousands of ghoulish zombies will be in Asbury Park Oct. 5 and even one of the city’s famous landmarks has been “zombified.”
The Zombie Walk, sponsored by the Chamber of Commerce, began in 2008 and, in 2009, went into the Guinness World Record for largest gathering of zombies, with 4,093 zombies. However, the record went down last November when 8,027 zombies at the Twin Cities Zombie Pub Crawl in Minnesota.
Organizers are hoping to beat that this year and welcomes everyone to participate. More than 15,000 are expected to lurch down the boardwalk and onto Cookman Avenue.
Zombies will begin gathering on the boardwalk at 10 a.m. and the official zombie counting for the record will begin at 3 p.m.
And, for zombie-lovers everywhere, the famous Casino carousel has also been “zombified” for the event. Monmouth University Professors Mike Richison and Marina Vujnovic, and Kean University Professor Ed Johnston, have created a computerized, augmented and “zombified” Casino carousel.
The three professors have created an augmented reality model of the carousel that has undead, zombie carousel horses.
The professors, in their full zombie regalia, will be set up in the Casino carousel house on Saturday to show display how it works and hand out special cards that can help download the application.
Augmented reality allows users of a smart phone or tablet to see a three-dimensional image on their screen. The team was given a grant from Monmouth University to find the boardwalk carousel, photograph it, and reconstruct it as a digital model.
“This project is truly the first augmented reality project of its kind in Asbury Park. It addresses the history of the Asbury Park boardwalk in a fun and visually engaging way, and it is completely accessible to anyone with an iPhone or Android device,” Vujnovic said.
Below is a video of the project:
