Muriel in VR

While doing some reading about Muriel Cooper, I thought I’d put some of the lessons learned from her into practice. As I mentioned in my blog post, Muriel’s efforts to break from the two dimensional screen and into 3D inspired a bit of experimentation. In this project, I learned a bit about WebVR using Mozilla’s A-frame and the WordPress API.

I started by simply connecting to a post I wrote about Muriel using JQuery and the WordPress API. Once I was able to pull the content, I began creating the VR structure using the syntax that A-frame provides. This meant that I had to include A-frame’s javascript file as well.

I then looped through the content and broke out each paragraph into a new array based on line-breaks. This gave me the ability to position each paragraph anywhere I wanted in the VR world. Because I wasn’t yet familiar with navigating and moving around in VR, I thought I’d just map out the post in 360 degrees around the viewer. I was hoping this might create a virtual story wherein one could move through and read. Displaying the images from the post proved to be a bit more difficult, and I ran into all sorts of problems with video, but I imagine I’ll get there eventually.

I’d like to make this more interactive at some point. A story wherein people can interact and move about exploring various media and text within the VR world. This project was featured in Glitch’s 2018 book highlighting 100 projects from 75 creators.