Emily's Digital Herritage VR Workshop Project

Summary

Down the Rabbit Hole is a virtual reality experience for exploring the New York Public Library’s archive of images and documents on Coney Island. It automatically flips through the archive, asking the viewer to pause when they see something of interest, just like flicking through a physical book. The selected image is brought to the forefront and information about it is shown, such as it’s name, date and any extra data. Then you can choose to follow content that matches either the theme, document type or decade of your image selection. Once you choose a path, a new flip book starts on that theme and your journey into the archives continues.
This experience can work with any number of images in the archive, as well as new additions, showing the vastness of the collection. At the same time, allowing the viewer to pick the image they are interested in, and then continue to follow their interests, gives them a sense of ownership. This can also help them to understand the importance of the act of archiving.

Process

Day 1

My first ideas were around celebrating the concept of chance and randomness.  This seemed fitting when dealing with such a large archive of images which leaves the viewer not knowing where to start. I found several interesting metaphors. Firstly, the notion of flicking through a book to browse the contents, then stopping at a particular page that sparks your interest. Secondly, the exquisite corpse, a composite object made up of random, yet categorised parts. And  finally, the “wikihole“, the phenomenon of following links from one wikipedia page to another, getting lost in the things that interest you.

Day 2 and 3

I decided to follow the idea of the wikihole. I wanted to use key metadata from the archives (date, theme and document type) as ways to link the content, as occurs when following a wikihole. I spent these two days building the project in Unity. The experience is centred around an automatic and rapid slideshow of images. At the beginning of the experience the slideshow is of all the images from the archive. The viewer can stop the slideshow with the controller when they see something of interest. This causes the image to be magnified and metadata to appear. At the same time, a menu appears with three different options. To follow the same theme as the selected image, follow the same document type, or follow the same decade. If you choose to follow decade, the slideshow starts again but only showing archive material from that decade. The slideshow can be stopped again and a different path can be chosen.

Day 4

To enhance the concept of space, I added in loops, that encircle the content and the viewer to represent the different trails they are taking. However, to enhance this point, I would like to add in an animation for the slideshow that enhances this conception of space, as though the images are circling around the loops and coming into the viewer’s vision.

Final presentation