Views of Old Main: Recreating History Piece by Piece

Abigail Gunther, Dan Bially Levy, Andie Walker

A screenshot of our prototype.

We fill physical space, crowding into buildings, passing through doorways, and walking down paths. With the advent of technologies like virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR), we have even been able to recreate many present-day spaces to explore and enjoy. However, rarely do we stop to consider the developments such places had to undergo before becoming the structures and spaces we are familiar with.

With this on our minds, we set out to create an immersive experience that gave people a peek into how a space can change over time, offering them an understanding of and appreciation for the process of change and the limits to recreating our own history. This culminated in a VR design that allowed users to walk through different periods in the history of Old Main, an academic building of Macalester College.

The demo video for our prototype.

Links to our prototype scenes: 1883, 1887, 1890, 1980s, today

Developing the Idea

We knew we wanted to work with a view of history, and so we began discussing the different directions we could take our ideas: we could recreate key historical events like a battle or the construction of an iconic building; we could create an environment that has been impacted by global warming; or we could focus on a city during a period of rapid development. To help guide our thoughts and refine our ideas, we took a look at some existing VR historical experiences:

• Access Mars takes you to the surface of Mars, complete with a rover and land markers you can hover over for information.
• The Wander app for the Oculus Quest utilizes Google StreetView to transport you to anywhere in the world.
• This YouTube video looks very close to how we first imagined our final product to be.

We noticed a common thread through many of these projects: immersion. Each project had created a complete environment that made you feel as if you were really there. With this in mind, and an idea of what extant VR historical experiences focused on, we set to work narrowing down our own focus.

Two questions guided our ideation: What is possible with what’s available to us? and How best can we use what we have to accomplish our goals? Building a historical location requires historical photos, and for most locations we had neither the time nor the ability to access that kind of information. Luckily, one of our team members did have experience working with the archives of one particular place: Macalester College. As a result, we were able to access numerous historical photos of the college that we could use in our project.

Top: Weyerhaeuser Memorial Chapel under construction (1968–9). Bottom: people climbing athletic bleachers behind East Old Main (1910).

Zeroing in on the use of historical photos, we came to three ideas:

1. Using the photos to recreate a fully immersive version of the space as it was during a particular time period.
2. Creating a museum-style timeline using flat plane photos in a virtual space to guide users.
3. Embracing the fact that the photos won’t be able to give us an accurate 360 view, instead using them to create a partial VR view and using placeholder objects to mark where other structures not in the photo would be in the environment.

We initially wanted to work with our first idea of creating an entire environment for our users to explore. However, after a brief foray into wrapping a 2D image to a 3D space, we quickly found that not only would each environment have a “seam,” but that linearly aligned structures looked like they had been built in a circular arrangement as well.

Photo of the Macalester College campus (1890)

Same photo of the Macalester College campus (1890) wrapped into a virtual space.

Wishing to maximize our users’ experience and understanding of the history as well as maintain as much historical accuracy as possible, we abandoned the idea. We also wanted to lean as much as we could into the immersion aspect of VR that we had witnessed in the many examples we looked at, so we discarded option two and settled on the third and last idea: using a combination of historical photos and placeholder objects.

With a concrete goal in mind, we booted up the 3D environment-maker A-Frame and started to build our first scene.

Building and Further Brainstorming

Combing through the historical images available to us, we discovered that finding photos of the same places through consistent periods of time was near impossible, and quickly narrowed down our focus to the Old Main building.

Further, as we grew familiar with A-Frame and its limitations, we began to think of ways to guide the user to select and move to different time periods: we wanted something that was on-theme and discreet, clearly interactable but did not break immersion too much. Doors, portals, and floating timelines were all discussed before we eventually settled on a book: after all, just as there are chapters in a book, there are chapters in history, and this way users could “turn over a new leaf” of the book to see newer versions of the same place.

The very first scene we made included a photo of Macalester from 1890, a brief caption, and an interactable book to change scenes.

The more we developed, however, the more we came to the ironic realization that one of the very things we were trying to highlight — the difficulty of recreating our past when there are gaps in our historical records — was also limiting us. Lacking the time to search the archives for maps, plans, and any other tidbits that could help us accurately create our building placeholders, we took a moment to regroup and recenter our goal.

Without any historical resources beyond the photos we’d acquired, we considered completely altering the direction of our project and creating a museum experience instead — photos would be scattered throughout a single space as exhibits our users could navigate through.

However, we wanted to stick to our original philosophy of immersion, and decided a museum environment would feel too controlled and too static; with everything laid out all at once, our users would be able to observe the process of change that the building underwent but not really experience it. Ultimately we chose to design an incomplete prototype of our original idea rather than develop something more complete but less true to our intentions.

User Testing & Feedback

Discussions with classmates and informal user testing provided us with feedback on our ideas and a better understanding of what our prototype conveyed. Our peers suggested that focusing on visual aesthetics and smooth transitions would improve the VR experience. They also hoped to see more historical materials — more photographs, but also more artifacts from the archives in general. However, they were interested in the narrative experience of watching a single place evolve over time, as well as the research behind it. Our user tests yielded similar feedback; they liked the different colored backgrounds for each scene and the experience of being immersed in a virtual space, and they expressed interest in seeing more fleshed out recreations of the historical environment through the use of placeholders or indicators of landmarks.

A selection of in-class feedback we received from our peers about what they liked about our product.

The Final Prototype

Since we were unable to master the book transitions, our final prototype includes five scenes that can be manually transitioned between in a “Wizard of Oz”-style of prototyping. There are a total of five scenes — five different points in time — of Old Main, each with an original caption.

An scene of present-day Old Main.

A couple scenes maintain some of the intended functionality in that users can switch between scenes by hovering over the book.

Hovering over the left page moves the user backwards in time. Hovering over the right page brings them forward.

The background colors also change to match the colors in the photo, accenting the different eras from which the building — and the photos — come.

A scene of an image of Old Main from 1887.

A Reflection on the Process

Throughout the creation of our design, we had to consider the issue of historical access and knowledge, which came to define both the knowledge and gaps in our final prototype. This, as well as our relative unfamiliarity with A-Frame, limited our ability to produce a fully working and immersive prototype as we imagined it. However, putting aside the more obvious technical gaps for a moment, we thought we’d dig a little deeper and share a couple of Tarot Cards of Tech that seemed particularly pertinent.

• The Radio Star: How might technological progress make other products or services obsolete? In bringing these artifacts from an archive to a digital space, the original physical artifacts may be devalued. Additionally, putting them into a virtual space removes them from their original context and may change the way that they’re viewed. However, by veering away from a museum-style experience, we hoped to lessen any impact on real museums and archives and their curators and archivists.
• The Big Bad Wolf: How might people use a product for predatory or exploitative goals? Some historical photos may contain potentially sensitive information such as addresses or peoples’ faces. Putting these photos in a public space could give others a peek into people’s private lives, and may also non-consensually offer up their image and appearance for AI learning — and abuse.
• Inspired by The Catalyst: How might cultural habits and use of a product affect one another? There are close ties between culture, history, and land; one need look no further than land acknowledgements. In this context, our product could be reopening unpleasant wounds for some or offering a chance for acknowledgement and discussion for others.

Had we more time, we would have liked to dig through the archives more to locate information we could use to implement our initial building placeholder idea. We would also have liked to become more familiar with A-Frame so we could’ve fully integrated the transitions between scenes, and built a more immersive experience.

Nonetheless, it has been an interesting and informative process on record keeping and history teaching for us and, we hope, encourages users to one day look at a building or space and wonder about its history and the developments it had to undergo to become what it is today.