If This Place Could Talk: Visualizing 150 Years of Virginia Tech’s History

Creative Director
Virginia Tech, 2018–present
Funded by Council on VT History, Office for Strategic Affairs

If this place could talk, what would it tell us? Virginia Tech’s sesquicentennial offers the opportunity to see and hear 150 years of history in twenty-first-century ways. As Creative Director on this project, I am working with a transdisciplinary team of faculty and students to uncover Virginia Tech’s history in its many dimensions—from the familiar to the hidden, from the triumphant to the painful. Using innovative digital techniques, we are bringing to the surface the full diversity of our shared past, allowing us to see what is normally unseen. The combination of a projection mapping kiosk with AR and VR allows audiences with varying interests to explore customized stories, places, themes, and populations over time. For example, the audience will stand around a small scale model of the campus while watching a video of its history. As certain locations are being described, the model will light up and appear as it might have been seen during that time period.

Employing Virginia Tech’s “beyond boundaries” model of transdisciplinary collaboration, our team is using the university’s future-minded education approaches to rethink its past. That process demonstrates the significant impact that faculty-student teams working across disciplines can have both in and out of the classroom.

Collaborators: David Hicks, Todd Ogle, Doug Bowman, Jenni Gallagher, Paul Quigley, Dillon Cutaiar, Elizabeth Berg, Isabella Cruz, Sarah Tucker, Taylor Carroll, Shawn de Lopez, and William Jung.