Introducing the photo album of the future

“A Virtual Memory Browser (VMB) is an imagined near-future software category which is intended for smartphones with both 3D image capture and virtual reality capabilities,” explains Norwegian media artist Syver Lauritzsen. “A VMB takes these technological trends and combines them into the photo album of the future.”

For his Masters thesis, Lauritzsen created The Memory Machine, a virtual reality experience that allows users to float around and explore glitchy 3D scans of Syver’s memories from the past few months. The scans themselves are intentionally glitchy and imperfect, to resonate with the concept of memories (some are sharp and clear while others are but a vague notion), resulting in a dreamlike, meditative experience. The installation also features an innovative way of moving around in a VR-environment using light head movements and a procedurally generated soundtrack, designed by Willas Rød, which reflects the memories the user is currently viewing.

“Photos primarily have an emotional function with consumers,” says Lauritzsen. “We capture and share them to hang onto memories. By expanding these photos into the third dimension, as well as taking advantage of the presence offered by VR, we can give photos a much greater emotional impact. Suddenly, instead of merely looking at an image in a photo album, we are actually there, in that very moment the image was taken.”

Syver is certainly one to watch, last year we covered his Monolitt project which took crowd sourced sentiment analytics and turned them into physical paint data visualisations.

Download The Memory Machine here.