Majdanek Museum
Director, Flash, Photoshop, VR Worx
As part of a college field trip to Poland, we teamed up with the Majdanek Museum in Lublin to create interactive educational pieces concerning the concentration camp.
Working in teams of 3-6, we spent several days photographing, scanning documents, and becoming familiar with the history of the camp.
Upon returning to the States, we had to share both what we learned and the digital files we gathered with class members were not part of the trip.
The group I was part of decided to create a virtual tour of the camp, using Apple’s Quicktime VR technology within a Flash/Director environment. The VR scenes themselves have graphical elements that relate to the larger interface, such as lines connecting typography and a camp map with direction pointer.
Our team was later approached to create a Polish version of the software, but the project eventually fell through.
The Cell
You wake up. Head pounding. Eyes stinging. As you regain your focus and the vertigo fades, you attempt to stand up. Having no memory of how you got here (aside from the nasty hit you took to the back of the head), you find yourself in a dimly lit concrete cell littered with curious, mechanical looking objects, and a fortress-grade door.
The Cell is a multi-user interactive experiential narrative that focuses on three main concepts: cooperation of users, exploration of the story, and puzzle solving. More specifically, the Cell is strictly dual-user: based on two side-by-side, nearly identical cells, each user must discover (through exploration alone) that the other user is trapped in the similar adjoining cell.
Two main faculties of the multi-user application are the ability to communicate between users through the chat interface, and the ability to trade objects between rooms. Each of these abilities (as with most of interface) requires some degree of mastery or familiarity from the users in order to be used effectively. This steep learning curve is afforded by the nature of the narrative: disorientation, confusion, mystery.

