BiographScope is an interactive installation meant to immerse visitors in an archival collection of early silent films from the turn of the twentieth century. The frames of seventy films from the Eye Filmmuseum’s Mutoscope and Biograph Collection are digitally reconstructed and distributed in a virtual world that users can freely browse and explore in a 360-degree Immersive Environment. They are able to appreciate the exceptional materiality of these films, discover them at large-scale projection and benefit from a thorough sonification process.
Research Objectives
The BiographScope installation was developed in collaboration with Eye Filmmuseum and scholars from the University of Amsterdam, with the goal of reimagining access to the Mutoscope and Biograph Collection—an early cinema archive of exceptional historical and material significance.
The project was driven by several core objectives:
- Immersion: To situate visitors at the centre of the experience, enabling intuitive, spatial navigation of the collection in an immersive, multi-user environment.
- Materiality: To foreground the analogue specificity of the original 68mm films—characterised by their large format, sharpness, and lack of perforation—by making the film strip itself the central unit of visual exploration.
- Atmosphere: To reproduce the spectacular scale and resolution of the Biograph films in a large-scale projection setting, evoking the immersive conditions of their turn-of-the-century exhibitions.
- Sound: To experiment with forms of sonification that acknowledge the historical role of music and sound in silent cinema, while allowing visitors to flexibly explore audiovisual interplay in contemporary ways.
Taken together, these objectives sought to preserve the archival integrity of the collection while also translating its unique qualities into a digital, immersive format. By combining historical fidelity with contemporary exhibition design, BiographScope provides a renewed encounter with early cinema that is both scholarly informed and sensorially rich.
Description of the Installation
Technical Environment
BiographScope is presented in Panorama+, a 360-degree stereoscopic projection system derived from the AVIE platform (McGinity et al., 2007). This environment combines visitor-centred and object-centred perspectives (Kenderdine, 2015), allowing audiences to physically inhabit a navigable archive. Within it, visitors orient themselves both spatially and relationally, engaging with film fragments as embodied participants.
The application was developed in Unreal Engine 5, using nDisplay to distribute rendering across Panorama+’s computing cluster. Interaction is facilitated through an HTC Vive controller, enabling intuitive, gesture-based navigation. Visitors move forward by pointing in a chosen direction and pressing the trigger, or select archival materials directly through targeted gestures.
Exploring Film Strips
The installation presents digital reconstructions of film strips from the Mutoscope and Biograph Collection. Each strip is composed of 24 vertically stacked frames, arranged as high-resolution textures within the virtual world. This design highlights the analogue specificity of the original 68mm films, preserving their material qualities even in digital remediation.
When a strip is selected, frames accelerate into motion like a projector scroll, seamlessly transitioning into full-screen playback. Films are projected at near life-size scale (approx. 3m high), evoking the spectacular theatrical conditions of early Biograph exhibitions. The surrounding screen darkens during playback, creating the ambience of a historical cinema.
The virtual world is structured as a shifting grid, creating the illusion of infinite traversal. Strips are randomly spawned around the visitor, while distant areas show floating frames that gradually coalesce into complete strips as one approaches. This dynamic recomposition—moving from fragments to full artefacts—intensifies the sense of presence and underscores the archival process of piecing together cinematic history.
Sonic Augmentation
Recognising that early cinema was rarely silent (Altman & Abel, 2001), the installation integrates contemporary soundscapes. Each film was sonified by a sound artist, who composed atmospheres using metadata and visual cues. Rather than historically reconstructing silent film accompaniment, the approach emphasises immersive resonance—for example, adding the rhythmic sound of feet to Les Parisiennes (1897), a cancan performance. This sonification strategy acknowledges the historical role of sound while encouraging fresh, sensory engagement.
An Intuitive Interface
The design of BiographScope privileges simplicity and responsiveness. Visitors glide through a navigable forest of digital strips, selecting films with minimal input to trigger projection and sound. The installation thus merges historical fidelity with contemporary immersion, inviting audiences to experience early cinema as both archival material and embodied spectacle.
References
Kenderdine, S. (2015). Embodiment, Entanglement, and Immersion in Digital Cultural Heritage. In A New Companion to Digital Humanities (pp. 22–41). John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118680605.ch2
For detailed information on the installation and the result of our pilot study, please refer to our publication on Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage: https://dl.acm.org/doi/full/10.1145/3672084