What is the Alexandria of VR?

When we think of libraries it’s easy to frame them in terms of the media they contain. Cuneiform on shards of clay, books in vellum and papers and old films on reels in subterranean stacks, waiting for a curious mind to descend to and reveal their messages. We’ve managed to catalog text, photos and film — often forced to wonder whether the tools to read the messages will still exist in the future.

Should VR be any different? Yes.

Despite it’s inherent defects (broken links etc) , we’ve done a good job of preserving the history of the Internet with the Internet Archive, Brewster Kahle’s lifelong project to crawl and catalog the entire internet.

Right now there are so many platforms and hardware options that, even if we focused solely on 360 degree video the exercise would be challenging. Then there is the matter of standards, protocols and addresses.

This in itself is an area that will shake out, likely with 1 closed garden winner like Facebook, a few for the Enterprise (Hololens/Linkedin), a few very large, public worlds built by users (SANSAR, High Fidelity)

These are “part” of an interesting library but what’s more interesting is a public resource where one could visit historical figures and scenes. Perhaps it’s simply aesthetics, but the technology, specifically Presence allows us to share space with leaders and invites us to begin building a library of the world’s treasured ideas.

Assuming volumetric capture weren't an issue, what message would you leave your ancestors?