RECollections

Inspiration

We were inspired by the oral tradition of storytelling as a way to pass on heritage, share wisdom, and maintain a code of ethics across generations.

What it does

RECollections allows you to record audio and replay memories of those who came before you. By using Oculus Quest with passthrough, memories integrate into a real space becoming a temporal-spatial archive of the community.

Memories are depicted as amorphous shapes starting out as grayed-out empty vessels. By recording a memory, the vessel become imbued with color and is released into the space as a digital fingerprint for someone else to listen to.

Overtime, the memories degrade to encourage the user to continue interacting with them and keep them alive.

How we built it

Oculus Quest 2 Passthrough (platform) Figma (Ideation/UX design) ShapesXR (Prototyping) Unity (Development) Maya (3D modeling)

Accomplishments that we're proud of

With our teams' collective background being heavily in Design, we are incredibly proud of the prototype and the quick learning of hard skills during this hackathon. Some of us using these technologies for the very first time!

As Future Constructors, we are most proud of the extensibility of RECollections and its possible applications.

We first imagined our XR experience as a way to document our teams' processes and experiences at Reality Hack, but we also see its use in other contexts:

Such as, something as small and intimate as a family home - where grandparents can leave messages for their grandchildren or members can continue to sense the presence of a deceased loved one. Or, an institution with a much wider audience, like a museum or cultural center, where museum-goers can share knowledge of the artifacts and begin to respond to each other.

What's next for RECollections

In the future, we'd like to focus on more features for accessibility and community building, such as speech to text for the hard of hearing.

We'd also like to add Machine Learning / Natural Language Processing, which could serve as community moderation, as well as informing the look and feel of the memory objects, Perhaps, subject mater or sentiment creates an automatic color association, or AI can group the memories by related content.