A beguiling and seamless blend of technologies across time, the AmbientPhoneBooth juxtaposes legacy technologies like rotary phones and locomotives with state-of-the-art virtual reality headsets and computation. Inspired in part by the Wind Phone in Japan’s Iwate Prefecture—a deactivated phone booth that thousands of people visit each year to “speak” to lost loved ones—the AmbientPhoneBooth is a work in progress. In the future, the user will be able to input family photos, home movies, and highly detailed scans of their childhood homes, and then experience these images as a hyper-real virtual reality recreation. At present, the virtual reality headset recreates the past experiences of a family home in Pittsburgh. “The goal is to create a template for future home media. To provide people with the tools to create interactive virtual memories of a home or place they once inhabited. We all share a common human story, of space and place and identity.

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Ziaire Trinidad Sherman worked as the composer, audio implementor and continues to work with MIT to technically maintain the system, remotely.