John Ashbery is known to be one of the greatest 20th-century American poet. “John Ashbery’s Nest” invites the general public to look at the world through Ashbery’s eyes and get to know who John Ashbery truly is. Through this virtual reality website, users walk through Ashbery’s first and only home using a 360° view and are able to freely explore the house. This interactive website allows users to click on various items throughout the house to learn more about how these items came to be part of Ashbery’s life. Each item is paired with a description along with a 3D detailed look and/or a voice recording of Ashbery himself explaining the origin and significance of this item. This personalized touch further transports the user directly into the Ashbery home. In attempt to understand him better, users are challenged to try to piece together how these household items have shaped him and his work.
The creators of this project, the Project Staff, consists of Yale Digital Humanities lab, ITS, and VHR who worked closely with each other for this dynamic virtual reality tour. Their main source of information is from John Ashbery himself, who served on the Advisory Committee, and provided first-hand information about his life and significance of his household items. The Project Staff also used various excerpts from previous interviews Ashbery has done, along with directly interviewing Ashbery, and a short film from Open Road Media to supplement their material. They also linked Ashbery’s poetry to some of the household items that have influenced it.
With this abundance of information, the Project Staff processed the information using VR photography to best display the information into an interactive look in to the house. John Ashbery’s Nest allows you navigate through this VR home and click onto each item for more detailed information about the item.
From the very beginning, the project uses VR photography to draw the user into the home, both literally and metaphorically, and thus instantly intrigues the visitor to explore more. Inside the home, the user can click on individual items to learn more about it as they look around the room, mimicking an actual tour of the house. This provides a very personal touch to the tour and encourages the user to explore to gather more information. Furthermore, the site has a non-Virtual Reality aspect of it where you can learn more about the back-end of the project along with sections that consolidate the poetry and items listed throughout the Virtual Tour as an alternative way to learn more. Overall, the John Ashbery Project is very engaging and invites the user to understand that there’s more to the famous poet we know.
Hi there,
I also choose to reverse engineer John Ashbery’s Nest! I think you did a great job at reverse engineering the website. I agree that the site is very engaging and allows the user to feel as though he or she is truly in Ashbery’s home. I like how you wrote that the virtual tour adds a personal touch because you really feel like you are inside of his house!
Wow, what a cool project! Thank you for sharing this with us Wanda. I really enjoyed how well written your blog is, as it reads just like a professional journal article. I appreciated your effort to include hyperlinks to relevant parts of the website. I now feel like I have all the resources I need to understand this project. You seem like you really enjoyed the subject matter of the website and appreciated the effort that the creators of this VR project took to bring it to online publication. Keep up the great work!!