MyRth: What If History Remembered Everyone?

The third and final project from VIS 161, spring 2022. "MyRth" started as a narrowing of the synthetic sensing concept and ended up becoming its own thing entirely. "Fabled Realities" was the tagline. The disclaimer about hallucinations was real.

The synthetic sensing concept had been too large. Useful as a framework, but sprawling in the way that early ideas often are — more territory than argument. The final project for VIS 161 asked for something more resolved, and so I narrowed. What emerged was MyRth.

The name is a deliberate compression: My, as in personal and subjective; Rth, as in earth, as in the ground beneath every story we have ever told about ourselves. The second meaning behind the name comes from "Myth" and "Mirth" because at the beginning, I thought my idea was rather amusing and didn't want to change my "witty" title once it started becoming more concrete and lucrative. The tagline was "Fabled Realities," which is either redundant or precise depending on how seriously you take the idea that all history is, to some degree, fable — shaped by who survived to tell it, who had the resources to write it down, and whose version got canonized while the others quietly disappeared.

That tension was the core of the concept. 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 — factual, mythological, oral, contested — could generate immersive historical environments that are genuinely multi-perspectival. Not one version of Ancient India, but the overlapping, sometimes contradictory versions that actually existed, rendered into a world you could walk through.

The user experience was designed around two modes. The first was a pre-configured interaction module — a curated environment, built from existing scholarship and oral retellings, that a user could drop into with minimal setup. You select a time period, a place, a narrative thread, and the system builds the world around you. You can interact with characters, both historical and mythological. You can move through architecture that no longer exists. You can, if you choose, eat the food — the "RealEat" function was one of the more enjoyable details of the concept, a haptic integration that would let the simulation extend into sensory experience beyond the visual.

The second mode was a creator function, which allowed users to configure their own modules — to specify the perspective they wanted to inhabit, the historical moment they wanted to explore, the oral tradition they wanted the AI to draw from. This was the more radical proposition, because it acknowledged that even a well-intentioned platform will have its own blind spots, and the most honest response to that is to hand some of the construction back to the user.

The pivot from the earlier synthetic sensing concept to MyRth was essentially a question of specificity. The space race framing — simulated experiments, planetary exploration, potential contact scenarios — was generative but diffuse. What I kept returning to was the problem of historical erasure, which felt both more urgent and more tractable as a design problem. The technology required to simulate a plausible version of a destroyed library or a suppressed oral tradition is, in principle, the same technology required to simulate Mars. But the stakes are different. One is a scientific convenience; the other is an act of cultural recovery.

There is an obvious criticism of this, and the concept didn't shy away from it. AI is not perfect. An AI trained on surviving historical accounts will reproduce the biases embedded in those accounts, however many perspectives it draws from. The disclaimer built into the MyRth interface — "Users are responsible for any Myrth-related hallucinations or delusions pertaining to the real world. Use at your own risk and limit yourself to 3 hours of simulation a day" — was partly a joke and partly a genuine acknowledgment that a technology this immersive carries its own distortions. The goal was never perfect historical accuracy, which is probably impossible. It was something more like honest multiplicity — a world that shows its seams, that offers several versions of events and lets the user hold them simultaneously rather than collapsing them into a single authoritative rendering.

What I find most interesting about MyRth, looking back at it now, is that the question it kept circling was not really a design question. It was an epistemological one: whose account of the past gets to become someone else's experience of it? That is not a problem any interface can fully solve. But it is a problem that a thoughtfully designed interface can at least make visible — which is, in speculative design, often the point.