Book Marks

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.

/ Technical Details

Book Marks 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.

/ Other Prototypes & Iterations

The initial prototyping phase involved experimenting with various web forms to explore the relationship between functionality and aesthetic expression. Following experiments focused on creating organic, handcrafted aesthetics within browser environments, evaluating both the visual and experiential qualities of the proposed space. Additionally, I explored the use of 2.5D (pseudo-3D) rendering techniques as an alternative to a fully immersive 3D environment, balancing depth with simplified spatial navigation.