IIT Madras’ new app uses AR, VR simultaneously to inhabit metaverse

Chennai: Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras on Thursday launched a MovingMemory app that uses the technology of augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) simultaneously and captures various moving models of memory through digital reconstruction.

MovingMemory can be accessed either through mobile apps (Android and iOS) or through browser-based platforms, making it uniquely inclusive in quality. It is a spatial app, developed with the potential to inhabit the metaverse world.

The functions of the app enable the user to select any desired avatar and navigate through three-dimensional spaces.

It is embedded with additional layers of video, audio, 3D images, and interactive elements which may be used as models for sustainable and heritage-oriented pedagogic and research approaches.

The ‘MovingMemory’ was launched at the ongoing second annual international conference by Indian Network for Memory Studies and the Centre for Memory Studies at IIT Madras.

The conference aims to connect rituals of remembering and experiencing the environment to systems of sustainability, which assume material, cultural, as well as technological dimensions through big events such as disasters and floods as well as through slow processes of change.

“It is crucial that we foreground the urgent need to incorporate collective memory in our understanding and ability to anticipate policies related to ecological issues such as climate change. Human as well as non-human forms of memory (such as the memory of water and the memory of nature) such as the Spanish Flu and the 2015 Chennai floods may be studied through interdisciplinary and collaborative formats in order to further memory studies as a discipline,” said Prof. V. Kamakoti, Director, IIT Madras, at the conference.