History, as it is typically rendered — in textbooks, in museums, in the kinds of educational experiences that pass for immersion — is almost always one-sided. The winners write it. The losers' versions survive, if they survive at all, in oral traditions, in suppressed texts, in the stubborn persistence of mythology that refuses to be entirely rationalized away. MyRth's proposition was that VR and AR technology, combined with AI trained on the full range of surviving accounts.

The second of three speculative design concepts from VIS 161, spring 2022. The term "synthetic sensing" is mine. The ideas came first; the rationale followed, as it often does. The premise was straightforward enough to sketch in a few sentences, which is usually a sign that the idea is either very simple or very large. This one turned out to be the latter. Synthetic sensing, as I conceived it, is the use of AR and VR technology to extend human perception beyond its current ph