This video clip shows the process the Electronic Literature Lab’s XR Programmer Andrew Thompson is making with making The NEXT’s Visualization space more immersive for visitors.
When we first created the Viz space, it was envisioned as way we could make physical artifacts from The NEXT’s collections accessible to the public, remotely. Objects like folios containing pre-Web hypertext literature published on floppy disks and the disks themselves could be viewed and manipulated at-a-distance.
Once we began working with WebXR on the Future of Text in XR project, we realized we could build a VR experience for visitors to The NEXT so that they could enter into a space with the artifacts and interact with them more seamlessly. This idea became the gist of my TedXTalk in March 2025.
At first, we merely placed the artifact in the VR space without any contextualizing information. But it occurred to us that we could populate the space with images, video clips, animations, and sound files so that visitors can understand the cultural and historical importance of the artifact and, ultimately, the work the artifact is associated with.
As the video clip above shows, when going to the Visualization space and accessing the beach ball used by Richard Holeton during his performances of his interactive novel, Figurski at Findhorn on Acid, visitors can don their headset and experience it in VR. There, they encounter an environment where vintage images taken of Holeton interacting with the beach ball float in front of them. A video of Holeton talking about the work hovers near the images, making it possible for visitors to hear the sound of his voice. The animation of the mechanical pig, which figures largely in the work, ambles around the visitors. When tossing the beach ball, visitors hear the sound of it bouncing. The sound of the plastic as they grab the beach ball provides a sense of verisimilitude to the artifact. All the media included in the VR space is intended to immerse visitors into the environment and understand the work through a multi-sensory experience.
We are now busily populating the spaces for the other artifacts in the Viz space.