“Archival Interfaces in Virtual Reality” makes its public debut! First at our internal UBC iSchool Research Day, and then in May, I will be presenting the project at the Archives Association of Ontario (AAO) Conference.

For Research Day (March 9), I gave an interactive demonstration of the ‘Archival Interfaces in Virtual Reality’ project (and presented a poster on the ‘Shades of #MAGA‘ project that visualizes the use of the #makeamericagreatagain and shorter #MAGA hashtags on Twitter). It was incredibly helpful to get informal feedback on the stereoscopic interface prototype, and the demonstration ended up tying for first place in the poster competition with Darra Hofman’s delightfully titled “‘A mouth is not always a mouth, but a bit is always a bit, and it matters little what it bridles:’ The relationship between privacy and transparency in digital records.”

One of the things that struck me while watching Research Day attendees try out the prototype was their desire to explore outside of the frame of the prototype – an appreciable fascination with the experience of VR itself. I’d certainly felt it myself upon trying the headset for the first time (I actually teared up a little at Google’s generic welcome screen) but it quickly became forgotten through the repetition of development and testing. The sense of immediacy – and bodily estrangement – has a powerful affective quality that I had wanted to explore with the project but it is also worth considering the threshold of where it becomes captivating to the exclusion of all else (i.e. the archives that it is meant to provide access to).

I also had the opportunity to meet the wonderful Nadia Caidi, our keynote speaker for Research Day, who suggested the possibility of using similar VR tools – given their portability and accessibility – as an entry point into the relationship-building process with communities who are underrepresented within the archival endeavour.

The next stop for the ‘Archival Interfaces in Virtual Reality’ traveling roadshow will be the Archives Association of Ontario conference at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, ON on May 10th, 2018.

In keeping with the conventions of the blog genre: the quintessential apology for not posting more often. Sorry.

So, a bit of catching up is likely in order – specifically with respect to how the project has changed since the carefree days of January where anything seemed possible and time stretched out infinitely ahead of me.

Where things started:

• focus groups, expert interviews, user testing, oh my!

Where they ended up:

• the ethics proposal itself is written and ready to go, but preparing the supporting documentation – from the user testing script to the questionnaire to the follow-up email for the follow-up email  – dauntingly threatened to engulf the time earmarked for development of the VR application and so, was ultimately scrapped
• the scrapping of the ethics proposal = no focus groups, no expert interviews &  no user testing

I should take a moment here to express my thanks to Jennifer Douglas for reminding me that independent study course students always start out by promising the moon.

The scaled back, more realistic version of the current project then becomes a feasibility experiment to investigate what would be involved if an archives were to undertake a small-scale virtual reality interface design project. The core of what was proposed – identifying a body of literature, creating a series of prototypes and recommending directions for future research – remains the same; it’s just being undertaken without, y’know, any input from the people who I hope would use the application. Failing user interface design 101. But it’s clear that the scope of exploring archival interfaces in VR is far larger than a three-credit academic course, so it will be good to have a point of departure for the next stage of the project…

In the midst of my experimentation with the Unity gaming platform, I’m struck with the idea that I don’t actually know what I am doing.

I refer not to my technical prowess in working with Unity, which admittedly leaves something to be desired, but rather the goal or objective of my design process in a larger sense. Although the exploratory nature of the project suggests a degree of openness in the process, a resistance to closing off avenues, I find myself in the realm of overly abundant possibility. Coming from a visual arts background, I am accustomed to working within constrained circumstances: testing the wiggle room of the rules, finding the pocket universe inside a seemingly bounded space, produces some of the most interesting and challenging work. A more pragmatic expression of the same sentiment is captured by Newell et al., who note that “beginning the design process with a relatively narrow feature list or functionality is advantageous” (238). Point taken.

Am I approaching the design of an archival interface in VR as the creation of a finding aid, a visualization, a virtual space or an encounter? Each paradigm entails a set of assumptions, a conceptual framing. What is the “relatively narrow feature list or functionality” that I am beginning with? Can I determine those parameters without having a comprehensive knowledge of what can be done within Unity? My bull’s run through the china shop continues…

Since projects rarely end where they start, I post the following to mark (create a record of?) the beginnings of “Archival Interfaces in Virtual Reality.”

An abridged version of the project proposal:

The project will explore potential applications for virtual reality (VR) in the design of archival interfaces, drawing from scholarly literature in the areas of archival access, archives and affect, user experience design and museum studies.

Numerous scholars have commented on barriers to access inherent within the physical spaces of archival institutions. VR may offer a new modality through which to engage non-traditional audiences, and enable interfaces that intuitively communicate archival principles through their design. To date, there have been no published studies on the use of VR in the archival profession.

The objectives for the study are to 1) identify a body of literature to support future studies in the development of archival interfaces in VR; 2) create a working VR prototype interface for a small collection of archival materials; 3) recommend directions for further research.

The project will take the form of an exploratory research design: first, I will conduct a literature search to provide an interdisciplinary theoretical grounding for the study. Using insights from the literature search, I will develop an experimental VR prototype and evaluate it through user-testing with both experienced and inexperienced archival audiences. The project will culminate in a final report detailing the development process, analyzing study findings and sharing lessons learned.