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Overview

The Horton VR project aims to create an immersive storytelling experience using virtual reality (VR) technology to bring to life the extraordinary story of George Moses Horton, an African American poet who overcame the challenges of slavery and illiteracy during the Antebellum period in the United States.

Showcasing my expertise as the Lead Developer and Designer for this project underscores my proficiency in Design Research. My skill set centers on XR, encompassing augmented, virtual, and mixed reality, spatial audio, and character design, as well as User Experience.

Detail 1

The Horton VR research project, led by Dr. Cecil Brown at Stanford University’s Centre for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA), who has extensive knowledge of Folklore, African American literature and Black heritage sites; with anthropological research being conducted by myself, a Ph.D. candidate at Simon Fraser University in the School of Interactive Arts and Technology (SIAT), under the supervision of cultural anthropologist Dr. Kate Hennessy and the Making Culture Lab (MCL), who has a deep knowledge of Media, multimodal anthropological practice looking at fugitive archives; along with Dr. Steve DiPaola at the SIAT iVizLab, who is a highly regarded scholar and innovator with artificial intelligence (AI) including computational systems for expression, movement, and gestures; and Reese Muntean Ph.D. in 360˚ photography, film, and preservation of intangible heritage, all come together lending their trans-disciplinary knowledge to ask critical questions that make this project robust and ripe for this modality of storytelling all taking place in and around the UNC-Chapel Hill campus.

Detail 2

The extraordinary life of George Moses Horton who, though born a slave, became a great American poet in North Carolina where literacy was denied to slaves. Horton managed to escape the censorship of slave literacy laws by becoming an oral poet. Our goal is to design an immersive story using VR that can teach history in the same format it was originally experienced. To bring back to life an underappreciated artist whose poetry challenged the divisiveness of antebellum America. By way of Horton’s story, we are investigating how empathy and presence are created using game design, avatars, and immersive narrative techniques that allow players to view Horton’s life from the inside. With reading, you have to accept the conclusion that the author has decided for you. By arriving at this particular way of interaction the player influences the way the story turns out.

A Request for a Love Poem ‘Oral storytelling is intimately concerned with audience’ (Ashe 2013), this is also true in the case of narrative role-playing where the use of an avatar situates the player ‘within the frame’ and the interaction between the avatar, player, and environment places the so-called reader in the middle of the story, unlike a traditional reading experience. To experience Horton’s poetry directly as an avatar in a game makes his work more accessible to audiences familiar with a gamified style of learning (Pereira et al. 2021).

Using Tivoli Cloud VR, an open-source, multiple-user virtual reality platform where people can interact through avatars, we leveraged Ready Player Me, an easily integrated avatar system used across platforms for multiple games. The team created an acoustic avatar of George Moses Horton and placed him inside the virtual environment (Tivoli Cloud VR) to demonstrate how users might ‘experience’ Horton’s poetry beyond the traditional frame of text. By doing so, we can now deploy other players to interact with the Horton avatar and his poetry in a virtual environment as well.

Horton was often approached by students on UNC-Chapel Hill’s campus where they would request romantic poems that they could write down and share with women who they wanted to impress. With this guiding information as the base of our storyline, we created a simulation, seen in image 2, where John would ask Horton to create a poem that he could give to his beloved wife Catherine. As researcher, participant, and role player in the game, this caused for ‘improvisation’ from the story's original script intertwined with historical aspects of Horton's real biography, along with new information based on the player's request. In other words, we learned to bridge the historical account with a contemporary subject matter through the avatar/character’s request or input which outlined a few specific attributes about Catherine that were weaved into Horton’s poem.

Detail 3

We analysed the activities of a player through three angles: character creation, character interaction, and game mechanics. From this exploration we found that by using open source platforms like Tivoli Cloud VR and Ready Player Me, we can provide a sandbox for testing the limits of virtual theatre before developing the world of Horton, using a more powerful game engine like Unity or Unreal. These programing tools will help us to expand the terrain in Horton’s world, allowing players to free roam and further explore the storylines via quests within the game. Working in collaboration with the Historical Society of Chapel Hill, CESTA, and SIAT, we can now tell a complete story of Horton’s life that has the potential to reach a broader audience and encourage a deeper understanding. The next step for the Horton VR project is to work with students at UNC-Chapel Hill to recreate McCorkle Place, the location where Horton spent most of his time delivering poems to students on campus prior to the Civil War, and expand Hortons’s world revealing the various terrains and routes to and from campus that he traversed over his lifetime of approximately 68 years. Using 360˚technology for area tracking, we are currently mapping out McCorkle place so we can craft a true-to-life gaming experience to best share the extraordinary story of a poet who overcame slavery and the throws of literacy during the Antebellum period in the United States earning him the title of ‘Naked Genius’.