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…