I’m just kicking off a new project at Tampa’s Museum of Science and Industry (MOSI) where I will [hopefully] be exploring ways to expand the idea of virtual learning spaces. A cursory google search of virtual learning spaces lists all kinds of spaces that students interact with on a traditional computer (think second life or blackboard), but lately I’ve been really intrigued by the idea that a physical space can also be a virtual space. I don’t mean replicas of spaces like you find in Second Life, but rather two distinct physical spaces, like virtual icing on the physical cake.
I’m a big William Gibson fan. A few years ago, I bought and read his latest book, Spook Country. In it, Gibson describes the idea of geohacking, which one of the characters uses to create location-based art. The idea is that you go to a physical space, put on some virtual reality goggles, and can see some memorialized event that occurred at some point in history at that specific location (the one explored in the book is River Phoenix’s death at the Viper Room in LA). Perhaps people were already doing this in 2005 when Gibson wrote his book, but certainly it is possible to do this type of thing now. There is something exciting about the idea that a sub reality exists within a physical space. This was not one of the reasons included in Read Write Web’s list of reasons people use location-based social networks, but I think it actually is a drawing factor of these services: it is a sort of sub-culture.
So, this is the impetus for my new project at MOSI. I’m not going to talk about how I plan to implement this virtual space until I am further along, but I have some ideas. The goal is to give visitors some sense of ownership in the physical space that is not achievable without a virtual experience. Plus, I hope that it deepens the overall experience at MOSI and perhaps improves the learning that happens within the physical space.
