Fantastic Reconstructions or Reconstructions of the Fantastic? Tracking and Presenting Ambiguity, Alternatives, and Documentation in Virtual Worlds (2002)
article⁄Fantastic Reconstructions or Reconstructions of the Fantastic? Tracking and Presenting Ambiguity, Alternatives, and Documentation in Virtual Worlds (2002)
abstract⁄This paper considers the presence of ambiguity, evidence, and alternatives in virtual reconstructions ofancient, historic, and other nolongerexisting environments. Because the foundation of thesereconstructions is data coupled to interpretations, virtual intellectual products can be grounded throughcritique and citations. The realworld basis for a virtual world may include multiple sources of evidence.This paper will demonstrate a methodology for making ambiguity, the quality of the evidence, andalternative reconstructions dynamically transparent to a user. This methodology harnesses thedynamism and perceptual expectations of multimedialiterate users. In our experiments we have mainlyused Flash and rollovers to create a static version of a ‘selftour’ that lets the viewer engage ambiguityand evidence in a virtual world dynamically and interactively so that the level of confidence can bemediated and adjusted as desired.By creating these tools, reconstructions can be explicitly linked to the real world while maintaining theflexibility, experience, and interactivity of the multimedia environment. Most importantly, the virtualrendition offers researchers the ability to show a complex set of variables dynamically, thereby allowingthem to be intuitively and interactively grasped in combination, a process that is not presently possibleusing standard techniques of static research presentation.
