The Bailiwick project employs the metaphor of a real house as the interface for a personal digital library, created inside Second Life.
This project is part of W. S Bainbridge's individual research and development work for the National Science Foundation, but its virtual content, expressed ideas, and views do not in any way represent the official position of NSF.
Components of The Bailiwick Project include: Family Members, Treasured Objects, Writings, Genealogy, and Images.
"Bailiwick" is based on a real house, but no attempt will be made to duplicate its physical appearance. Quite apart from the effort required to create a realistic virtual model of this complex structure, the result of such effort would not be sufficiently large and open for convenient use by Second Life avatars. Rather, a very simple notional house is being constructed, with the correct arrangement of rooms but no attempt to incorporate all the details. The main work is being invested in the virtual objects in and around the house which represent real things from the family's past and that serve as entry points to the digital library. Part of the library will be constructed here, on this wiki, and other parts will be distributed across the web. Each room will represent the life of the person who lived in it, or of the people who visited the house and their ancestors. Thus, Bailiwick will be a collection of metaphors that provide humanly meaningfull access to information about the family who lived in the real house.
The original core of the house, entered through the front door, was built in 1743. Really! Another large section of the house, the only part with a basement, was added perhaps a century ago, with a small kitchen tacked behind. The Bainbridge family lived here for the decade prior to January 10, 1950. Here are two photographs that date from about 1940:
By pure accident, in the mid 1940s, two snapshots of the front of Bailiwick were taken from slightly different locations, and it proved possible to combine them to produce a "virtual world" stereo image. Sit back some distance from your computer, look at the pair of pictures below, and allow your eyes to cross until you see three images of the house, the central one combining a picture as seen by each eye. You may need to tilt your head to get the images perfectly horizontal, and fitting on top of each other. Once you get the hang of this, you will see the house in three dimensions, almost as if you were really there, way back then.
The concept behind the Bailiwick Project is that in future many families will want to have a virtual location that represents their shared heritage and provides access to many kinds of information and images from their collective past. A logical choice is their ancestral home, or even a neighborhood representing several places they have lived, brought together into one virtual location. Naturally, future technologies may make it easy to produce a realistic model of a real home, perhaps by automatic assembly of a large number of digital pictures taken inside the home while the people are living in it. But a virtual home need not achieve photorealism in order to be homelike, if it collects many meaningful images and concepts in a life-enhancing manner.
By its very nature, an individual or family digital library is a personal and even subjective creation. Thus it is quite natural for this research project to focus on the researcher's own childhood environment, because the aim is to prototype personal digital libraries that will be equally personal for other owners. Conveniently, the researcher possesses much information with which to build Bailiwick, including a far greater library of family publications than most people are likely to have. However, once this technology is somewhat mature, people will be able to begin to collect the kinds of information that will make their own family digital library a rich resource, and to do so over a period of years as they create the virtual home for themselves.