Initial Assessment
Getting started with the long-term care of immersive media (XR) can be overwhelming. Multifaceted production processes, complex components and challenging access requirements can all confound applying established digital preservation practice. This section will help you work through an initial assessment, identifying the characteristics of the XR experience you are trying to preserve and pointing you in the direction of resources where you can learn more.
Context
This section considers where an XR experience has come from, including established networks of care, and the institutional frameworks which will need to navigated.
Production and Display History
How was the experience created? What conditions/context informed this process?
Who created and/or has cared for the experience up until now? What will their roles be as long-term care continues?
How has the experience been presented in the past? Can you gather documentation to support transmitting this to future stakeholders?
Consider what is needed to make the XR experience accessible to different audiences.
What is need to make the experience comfortable and safe for users? e.g. invigilation
Organisational
Can this media be collected in accordance with your organisations preservation policy? The longevity of an XR experiences is difficult to predict and there are few guarantees when it comes to long-term access.
What are your overall goals in terms of preservation i.e. what 'level' of preservation do you hope to achieve? e.g.
Documentation of the media?
Archiving digital components of the media (bit-level preservation)?
Archiving physical and/or hardware components of the media?
Maintaining long-term access to the experience and/or components?
What infrastructure will you need in place to achieve these goals?
What expertise will you need to draw upon to achieve these goals? Does your organisation have any in-house expertise you can draw upon or will you need external support?
Experiential Characteristics
Immersive Media Type
Immersive media technologies can be used to create experiences that combine elements of physical and virtual environments in different ways. The following terms are frequently used to characterise types of immersive media:
Virtual Reality (VR) refers to experiences where a user is fully immersed in a virtual environment. All elements of the environment experienced are virtual (typically through an HMD) and the user is unable to see the physical environment they are occupying.
Augmented Reality (AR) refers to experiences which add virtual elements to a real-world physical environment. The environment experienced combines virtual and real-world elements, the former often being superimposed onto a camera feed of the latter.
Mixed Reality (MR) combines elements of VR and AR.
Together, VR, AR and other related terms, are sometimes referred to using the umbrella label XR.
Interactivity
The extent to which the user can interact with an XR experience can vary in several ways. One is the extent to which the user has control over their spatial position in the virtual environment during the experience:
In a fixed-position experience, the user views the environment from a fixed position. Only rotational tracking, known as three degrees of freedom or 3DoF, is used in these experiences.
In an on-rails experience, the user moves through the environment along a predetermined path. Only rotational tracking, known as three degrees of freedom or 3DoF, is used in these experiences.
In a fully interactive experience a user can change position within the environment freely. Rotational and positional tracking, known as six degrees of freedom of 6DoF, are used in these experiences.
Elements of the virtual environment may also be interactive. This is dependent on the way in which the VR content has been produced. 360 video content (see Technical Characteristics) is typically not interactive, as the moving image sequence was predetermined when the video was produced. Real-time 3D software content (see Technical Characteristics) is more likely to have interactive elements as the moving image sequence is generated on-the-fly and so can respond to user input.
Technical Characteristics
Identifying Key Components
Technical characteristics depend on the kinds of components the experience makes use of. Immersive media content is the stored digital material that is created to be experienced through XR hardware. This generally fits into one of two categories, which significantly impact the approach taken to preservation. Identify what type of immersive media content you are working with and consult the relevant subsections of the Knowledge Base:
3D Software is immersive media content produced or stored as real-time 3D software (see Introduction to 3D Software). This is typically produced using game engines.
360 Video is immersive media content produced or stored as video (see Introduction to 360 Video).
Then consider what hardware or other physical components are needed to provide access to this content:
XR Hardware is the physical computer and human-interfaces devices required to access the immersive media content (see Introduction to XR Hardware).
Physical Components are other (non-electronic) physical components that form part of the immersive media experience (see Introduction to XR Hardware). This might include props, flooring, seating or other environment characteristics.
Condition Assessment
Having identified the components, consider their condition and the potential implications for long-term care. This can help identify potential vulnerabilities, inform preventative actions and highlight immediate treatment needs. The following questions may help guide this process:
If hardware has been received, is this functional? If not, what needs to happen to make it functional?
Are any of the components used obsolete (i.e. neither sold nor supported anymore)? If so, are these components integral to the work and can they be repaired?
Given responses to the above questions, would it be worth intervening now to stabilise the condition of the components?
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