About
Circle: heartbeats and augmented whispering objects” is an augmented reality installation, contained in a wooden silver chest, that tells a story of four generations of women through a series of small interconnected moments, accessed when the viewer, wearing a Meta headset, sees and touches the exhibited work. Whispered audio tells stories of Carnaby street and lost mothers, illness and births a belief in magic and the literal haunting of a gold bracelet with a hidden heartbeat. The pieces can be encountered in any order, though the power of the piece is diminished if the viewer only listens to one or two objects: the power of the piece results both from the cumulative weaving of the stories and the intimacy of an interface that requires human handling to bring the voices to life. The piece can also be experienced via ipad
The version that was most widely exhibited builds upon, but also significantly departs from an earlier iteration of this work created in 2012. That first experiment was built as a tabletop theatre, using a found-object pop-up paper theatre and accessed viawebcam using what was, at the time, pioneering computer vision technology and a custom interface and marker-tracking library (the paper theatre was covered in black and white fiducials). That 2012 version was influential, shortlisted for the UK New Media Writing Prize and awarded the Electronic Literature Organization’s 2012 juror’s prize (the secondary url provided links to a vimeo video walk-through of the original version). “Circle: heartbeats and augmented whispering objects” reimagines and reinvigorates the piece. Recoded and with an entirely new interface, this version was among the first fictional pieces for Meta Spaceglass.
Early Versions Documentation
Meta Documentation
