Internet Archive VR

tags: devlog

Website: https://archive.org/
Gitlab: https://gitlab.com/unityversity/InternetVARchive
Github: https://github.com/madjin/internet-archive-vr
Dweb: https://hackmd.io/@XR/dweb
Album: https://imgur.com/a/u882EZS

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Intro

The Internet Archive is an American digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge." It provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, software applications/games, music, movies/videos, moving images, and millions of books.

This dev log is all about the VR demos we made that are about the great archive.org.

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Google Earth

https://i.imgur.com/hk91n9q.mp4

Foggy

Snowy

Visit: https://vesta.janusvr.com/bepis/archive-snowy

Visit: https://vesta.janusvr.com/bepis/archive-rain

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Interior

Finally somebody archived the archive. Thanks to Simbridge we now have a virtual timecapsule of inside the building.

Stylized

Lets pause for a moment. This is virtual reality, where anything is possible! When it comes to digital, limiting ourselves to the limits of reality is just one style out of many.

Visit: https://vesta.janusvr.com/bepis/archive-street

Visit: https://vesta.janusvr.com/bepis/archive-street2

Artificial neural nets were used to paint the geometry and other effects to simulate an underwater version of Internet Archive.

Here's the plain vanilla version.

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History

2015

Internet Arcade: https://archive.org/details/internetarcade
Metacade: https://hackmd.io/@XR/metacade

Metacade is a web based VRcade project powered by javascript and MAME and modeled after Flynn’s Arcade. The arcade machines are powered by the Internet Archive's video game collection.

2016

Internet Archive VR experiences: Tango 1 / Tango 2

http://assets.metacade.com/library/ Internet Archive 20th Anniversary timecapsule

2017

James Baicoianu build a WebVR experience with leap motion in which you could search media from the Internet Archive's collection in VR and play it, all inside your browser.

http://assets.metacade.com/archive/archive.html Play media from the archive

Video (VR mode): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=InprppZdNew

Video2 (Desktop mode): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZsvjmyvX0g4

2018

Components: https://madjin.github.io/janus-guide/#/examples/components?id=search

James Baicoianu updated the VR archive experience with new media types and an environment inside a 3D scan of the Great Room.

http://assets.metacade.com/internetarchive/ Search the archive inside the archive

Timecapsule from Virtual Worlds Vault, Dweb 2018: https://vesta.janusvr.com/bepis/ford-vault/

Created the outdoor and indoor world

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2020

Github: https://github.com/madjin/internet-archive-vr

Bringing the Internet Archive to other virtual worlds and making cryptoart with it.

VRChat Worlds

Plain 3D scan

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Alternate realities

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Here's how the raw Matterport scan looks like in Unity without any modifications.

Closer to how the Great Room looks like in real life.

Underwater version made with volumetric light, fake caustics, and ambient sounds.

Overgrown version. Textures made with Substance painter and then added some Ivy over top the scene. To-do: add some birds flying overhead.

Studio world has a camera system imported in for doing panels and interviews on stage.

From here we can host Dweb virtual productions. The world is optimized to support Oculus Quest users. We can have panels about Web3 and VR while in VR!

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Blockchain Artifacts

The Great Room

https://makersplace.com/jin/the-great-room-2-of-2-31901/

There are bits of information invisibly flowing all around us in ever increasing rates. Considering that 90% of the world's information was generated in the past 2 years, our world has become completely submerged within a digital reality.

The Internet Archive is a modern day Library of Alexandria with a mission to provide Universal Access to All Knowledge. Within this former church, the servers behind these walls currently store over 330 billion web pages, 20 million books and texts, 200,000 software programs, 4.5 million audio recordings, and much more.

Since 2015 the Internet Archive has called for a distributed web and has been experimenting with systems like IPFS for its own systems. Within this Great Room the original architects of the web like Vint Cerf and Tim Berners Lee along with the next generation have gathered to discuss technologies of the decentralized web and how we can build it together.

This piece symbolizes the story of Noah's Ark with water representing the vast quantities of data that we produce every year. The flood can also be interpreted as a form of destruction like fires were for past libraries.

The Great Room comes with a mp3 file of the background music playing in the VR experience, an underwater remix of the Temple of Time theme. This token is also the first NFT ever sent to the Internet Archive: https://opensea.io/assets/0x2a46f2ffd99e19a89476e2f62270e0a35bbf0756/27830/

VRC World: https://vrchat.com/home/launch?worldId=wrld_b4475921-0b47-4380-ac47-22622fd4cbf4&instanceId=0
JanusXR: https://madjin.github.io/internet-archive-vr/indoor/water.html

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The Golden Era

https://makersplace.com/jin/the-golden-era-1-of-2-31684/

Are we living during the Golden Age of the Internet or has it already come to pass? Time moves in one direction, memory another.

Artifacts have played an important role throughout history for societies to preserve their culture and heritage. Without them, civilization has no memory or mechanism to learn from its successes and failures. Much of the cultural artifacts of the past 20 years are produced in digital form. The Internet Archive is the amber of the information age.

The Archive's vision is to build a version 2 Library of Alexandria and provide Universal Access to All Knowledge. Within this former church, the servers behind these walls serve millions of people each day with access to over 330 billion web pages, 20 million books and texts, 200,000 software programs, 4.5 million audio recordings, and much more.

The Golden Era depicts what the Internet Archive looks like present day, but not necessarily thinking about present time. There is something about the early internet that we admire and reminisce about, it

This piece is also a metaphor for what the archive is: amber for the information age. What touches the Internet Archive fossilizes into a digital artifact made to last forever.

This NFT is also the very first tokenized avatar file, minted atleast a month before the first Cryptoavatar (Orion). The owner of this piece is able to extract from the gif a CC0 licensed VRM hedgehog and use it as an avatar across dozens of programs. Golden hedgehog also pokes fun at Sonic games.

VRC World: https://vrchat.com/home/launch?worldId=wrld_9105c877-31d3-4913-8e15-595b47bd6982&instanceId=0
JanusXR: https://madjin.github.io/internet-archive-vr/indoor/index.html
Hubs: https://hubs.mozilla.com/scenes/dSgoJtN

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The Archives

https://makersplace.com/jin/the-archives-1-of-2-31896/

The web is an ephemeral media, always growing in size, and stuck in a constant state of rot. Even as nature has slowly overtaken the church, a faint hum can still be heard coming from the machines.

As our society became more digital, the archives have played an increasingly important role in preserving our culture and all knowledge into the ultimate library and allowing universal access. Perhaps by delivering on this ambitious mission the Internet Archive could be considered by future generations as one of the great Wonders of the World.

This piece symbolizes the test of time as it relates to our digital history. Our past can be traced back thousands of years, with Sumerian tablets and libraries lasting milleniums. The web as we know it is only 30 years young, mostly stored on storage devices that need to be refreshed every 5 years. Will the Archives stand the test of time so that future generations can not only recover, but also make sense of our collective digital footprints?

Within this piece there is a GLTF model of Suzanne, a bejeweled monkey head that is used as a standard reference model for 3D graphics. This artifact can also represent the quest for immortality like a golden mummy mask.

VRChat World: https://vrchat.com/home/launch?worldId=wrld_a00ec13c-fc45-4489-b5c3-7ffc434e16af&instanceId=0
JanusXR World: https://madjin.github.io/internet-archive-vr/indoor/earth.html

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WebGL Versions

Optimized the 3D scan mesh down to 120k triangles and 5 textures, much more ideal for working with WebGL. The model is hosted up on Sketchfab and available to download: https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/internet-archive-b895255e32fd408eab9cf6d4d092c1b9

JanusXR

These experiences below are made using JanusWeb, a framework for building social virtual reality experiences.

Outside

Inside

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Mozilla Hubs

• https://hubs.mozilla.com/scenes/dSgoJtN
• https://hubs.mozilla.com/NpEDx7H/greatroom

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2021

Webaverse

• https://webaverse.com

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To-do:

• Setup Leap Motion and record clips from VR experiences
• Upload older Internet Archive VR experiences to repo
• Record clips with slow camera movement going from Google Earth, to archive-street, to inside the archive, to great room, then watch a presentation / play media.
• Get links to all the components involved for documentation purposes
• Optional: Get clip from orbit mode around library (FirefoxG)
• Optional: create a portal hub via church arches