Visitors can review Eddie's payment summary for all his NetTube subscriptions and purchases.

Postlude

We hope that after experiencing all 3 sections of the exhibit, visitors will understand our intention for the exhibit design:

The three sections of this exhibition demonstrate the progression of how memory came to be commercialized. During this process, social norm also changed dramatically.

The first representative application of experience sharing and memory manipulation was a hotel commercial advertisement. Through projecting a luxury Japanese hot spring hotel environment onto prospective customers’ everyday surroundings. They can enjoy a simulated high-end hotel experience while continuing on with daily activities within a physical context. The purpose of this AR ad was to attract potential consumers through combining an ideal vacation experience with their real-life activities.

In 2028, popular influencers started to provide immersive interactive romance relationship content for subscribers. This was remarkable because it marked the beginning of the memory-sharing economy boom. Since then, people started to pursue virtual memory and simulated intimate relationships while ignoring real life experiences. Desires unfulfilled in the real world was actualized through digital human interactions. Also during this time, the legitimacy of virtual memory became a hot issue. Which memory was more valuable? Depressing real-world memory or simulated memory filled with happiness? The answer became ambiguous.

By 2045, Eddie had long since quit his day job and became a professional gamer of ten years. And thus, he spent most of this time at home. However, he still experienced a lot. Over the years, technology has advanced to the point of being able to support immersive experience documenting and sharing. People who can provide special memories are the new stars. Professionals and experts’ memories are usually more valuable. For them, memory-sharing has become a major source of incomes. However, ordinary people can also benefit from sharing memory.

Making a living through selling his own gaming experience on NetTube, Eddie also purchases memories that suit his needs. Besides buying popular memory products, such as others’ vacation and extreme sporting experience, he has also been subscribing to an average person’s life for three years. During this period, he lived a happy family life and experienced a lot of beautiful and memorable moments, such as getting married, celebrating anniversaries, companying “his” wife while she gave birth to “their” first baby. These memories are indispensable and invaluable to him; he can never let them go. A possible future for Eddie is to continue to subscribe to the same person, enjoy an “intimate life” with a family who never actually know him.

REFLECTION

One aspect we wish to improve our exhibit design is increasing visitor autonomy through a better curation. Although we provided the manual aiming to guide visitors going through the three sections by themselves, the entire experience is still not seamless: the interactive components within each section requires manual configuration after one visitor has experienced it. Also, some hardware keeps experiencing failures, and we have to intervene visitor’s experience to fix them.

In addition, since the majority of the provided materials are print-outs, it’s hard to control the sequence of viewing these prints. This results in confusions in the storytelling and the effectiveness of the offered interactive experiences that support the story. One way to improve this is using other multimedia, such as audio or video contents, to better guide visitor’s experience and provide a dynamic and clearer storyline.

Another point of improvement is the design of the spaces. We designed our three sections to be semi-closed, and visitors could see all three rooms all at once from the very beginning. This type of configuration diminishes the “surprise” feeling and in a way weakens the effect of storytelling by impeding visitors from experiencing the progression of the storyline. If we were to improve it, we could enclose the space for each section.