John Ashbery’s Nest‘s unique welcoming to the website is extremely intriguing as the site uses a smooth 3D zoom-in effect as an introduction to the house the users are about to tour. Such seamless visual effects and graphics greatly contributes to the realism of a virtual house tour, for which I’ve decided to reverse engineer this highly interactive, multimedia digital project.
This project presents a remarkably interactive and detailed virtual house tour of an American Poet, Josh Ashbery, which includes all of his furniture, home décor and artwork in the center hall of the house (and eventually all of the rooms). According to the website, the idea of such tour resonates with the poet’s idea of “being in the middle of things” as viewers are able to experience the house in almost a first-person perspective. Throughout the tour, viewers can freely explore most of the pieces in the house accompanied by the poet’s voice, text and video explanation, as well as other related artifacts that allow viewers to closely connect with the poet’s life.
The project staffs were able to receive permission from the poet to use primary source materials like photographs, readings and interview excerpts. In addition, videos and short films are also used as permitted by Open Road Media. Through the support from Yale Media and Broadcasting Center, the site processed the raw materials through editing and digitalizing (i.e. audio recordings of the poet as well as individual artworks and furniture). Most importantly, the project employed a 360 Photography technology that digitalizes the real spaces of the rooms into virtual graphics. After complex sourcing and processing, the project is presented to the users in various ways. Users can freely and closely explore the house and individual works as they move through digital spaces and can easily find detailed information regarding the items that the users have clicked on, accompanied by additional text information, images, as well as recordings of the poet. Aside from the interactive tour, users can also find specific detailed information by clicking on the menu bar, which provides all of the text information, images, audios and videos in a more organized web-page manner, with a special feature of an interactive timeline that highlight major events of the house.
I personally believe that this project is academically important in the field of arts and humanities as it helps preserves a detailed level of artifacts that illustrate both the poet’s work and personal life. With the house being privatized in recent years and prohibiting visitor’s access, these type of projects is an effective way to keep the house digitally public while at the same time, increase public awareness as the interactivity of the site makes the subjects more interesting.