Places Lost and Found: Restoring 1950s Havana in Virtual Reality as a Case Study in Experiential History

Saturday, January 7, 2023
Franklin Hall Prefunction (Philadelphia Marriott Downtown)
Lindsey Maxwell, Florida International University
Digitalization is rapidly transforming how historians conduct inquiries, integrate findings into their teaching, and engage with the public. Virtual (VR), Augmented (AR), and Extended Reality (XR) technologies are opening new avenues for investigating and reconstructing the past. Simultaneously, they provide new opportunities for preserving places that have ceased to exist in physical form or become temporarily inaccessible. Emerging virtual technologies also offer means to explore new applications of history and invite multidisciplinary collaboration. This poster showcases a prototype of Places Lost and Found: 1950s Havana, a project that utilizes Social VR to offer a web-based, 360-degree immersive, and embodied experience for a larger study on the benefits of experiential history for the humanities.

The poster presentation has a physical and a virtual component. The traditional poster summarizes intellectual, creative, and technological approaches to crafting the VR experience. It details how South Florida’s demographics inspired this effort, in what ways the university and the community collaborated to gather source material, and through which stages the three-dimensional reconstruction process progressed. Highlighting student involvement throughout the project, it also discusses how similar ventures may be implemented in other academic settings. The virtual component of this presentation, meanwhile, invites visitors to explore the VR prototype for themselves. Built with the aid of the Spoke VR/AR authoring tool and Mozilla Hubs, this virtual experience permits real-time social interactions for up to twenty-five visitors at a time via computers, smartphones, and tablets.

The VR prototype serves as the foundation of a study on the benefits of experiential history for collective memory and intergenerational storytelling. Generally, immersive and embodied experiences present new aspects of oral history as a process. The Social VR platform assumes the role of an interlocutor that provides visual and aural information to which study participants respond by recounting and exchanging memories. Thus, it generates data on the use of digitally recreated environments to further understandings of how participants can be co-constructors and actors in immersive historical settings. Focusing on the exile experiences of Miami-Dade County’s vast Cuban-American community, this VR project invites seniors of Cuban descent to relive everyday-life episodes of their childhood and adolescence. The platform enables virtual visitors to revisit city streets and sites of significance as avatars of their younger selves and in the company of friends and family. The study generates new insights from recollections and interactions between participants who explore the virtual locales. Investigating the interplay between collective and individual memories, it aspires to clarify how experiential history can facilitate new forms of intergenerational oral history.

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