Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT Madras) Centre for Memory Studies has launched a ‘MovingMemory’ app that uses the technology of Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality simultaneously. It captures various moving models of memory through digital reconstruction, as per the official release.
‘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, it added.
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 during the second annual Indian Network for Memory Studies conference titled ‘Memory, Ecology and Sustainability,’ an international conference being conducted by the Indian Network for Memory Studies and the Centre for Memory Studies at IIT Madras from 20th to 22nd September 2023, mentioned the release.
The conference was inaugurated on 20th September 2023 by V. Kamakoti, director, IIT Madras, in the presence of Seema Massot, director, American centre, US Consulate General, Chennai, Jyotirmaya Tripathy, head, department of humanities and Social sciences, IIT Madras and the faculty coordinators Avishek Parui and Merin Simi Raj.
“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,” V. Kamakoti, said.
The international conference saw around 100 presenting and over 500 non-presenting participants from all across India as well as from the USA, U.K., Germany, New Zealand, Morocco, Canada, Sweden and Bangladesh, among others. The Conference aims to examine the various human-centric technologies and policies apropos of cultural memory and sustainable development goals in India as well as globally, as outlined in the press release.
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.