Abstract

This project is a retrospective of my bookshelf over the past 5 years in 4 different places I have lived. Moving is hard, and parting with books is even harder. Despite learning this lesson every time I move, I cannot stop myself from buying new books as I settle into a new place. Books define me, and they define my homes. In this virtual space, I have collected data on the books I once owned in the past years, building a permanent space for them to coexist. This 3D media archive is a place of storage, memories, and personal relationships with my books. I invite you to walk through the space as you would wander in a bookstore, with the coordinates of each book based on its relevance to others. I hope my connections with the books will help you discover something new, and I appreciate hearing your findings if you choose to share them.

Research

Technical Details

Bookmarks is a 3D environment mainly built with Three.js, also together with various front-end libraries for different functionalities. For the server and back-end database, I hosted my instance on digitalOcean and used Node.js and Express.js to connect the client and server as well as responding to GET/POST requests. There are several interactive features in this space : - The audience can use arrow keys to navigate in the space like wandering in a bookstore. - They are able to pick up books and compile their own little book list that they can look up after. The list is downloadable as a pdf file with my thoughts and book info on it. - The world map is a larger view of the space, where they can use it to quickly navigate to another area on the landscape. - Throughout the space, there are holes randomly distributed where the audience can go there and whisper a comment into.