 here today preserving things and talking about how we can do it really well. I assume that we're doing it for these four reasons, right? It's entertaining. It's really fun. It's fascinating. The past is fascinating. We also do it because it's incredibly inspiring, right? The people who have gone before us have redefined what's possible. They punched the ceiling out, and we've come in their footsteps. We also do it because it's healing, right? How can we look at the future when we're mad or we're sad, right? So that's really important, too. And we also do it for the wisdom, right? We want to pass on ideas to generations that are coming next. So as you know, we're living in information overload, right? It's almost too much to take. We're even worried that our kids won't be curious anymore because information is everywhere. But when you move up to knowledge, you start to realize that you can think of knowledge as like a map, a physical map in your brain, right? It's not only where information goes, but it's your ideas and your expectations and your beliefs, right? And your predictions. If I do this, this will happen. And wisdom is that on a larger scale. It's a bigger map. It's how we do things as a whole, right? And it's this transgenerational decision-making that we want to make. So at the last conference I was at, a futurist, Ted Shilowitz, asked everybody to take out their cell phones, hand it to their neighbors, and he asked those people to put the cell phone in their pocket. People were extremely uncomfortable, right? And so it just goes to show you, I mean, we're living in a new world, right? We're stepping hand in hand into something together, right? And humans are really good at creative thinking. We're good at emotional thinking. And we're good at taking bits of information and seeing how they correlate, right? And computers, on the other hand, are good at organizing big maps, right? They're good at coordinating all the people from around the world, right? And they're good at connecting us. So as you know, my name is Zenka. I am both a preservationist and a futurist. And I work at looking at exponential technology and fundamental thinking to improve the outcome of the future. And today I'm going to talk to you about the four-dimensional map, right? This time-space map, it's the library or the search engine or the index. You know, the marketing people had no idea what to call it. So we call it the adventure platform, the research, the prediction, the education platform. I'm going to talk to it, talk to you guys about it, from its creation around the year 2018, all the way up until today, the year 2028. So you can think of it, right, as taking all of the things, right? The movies, the books, all these buildings that we preserved in the objects and putting it onto the Earth, right? And then adding a layer, a dimension of time, right? So you can go down on the map and go back in time and up and go forward in time, right? You can see what was happening around you, what books and movies and things were published at that time. You can curve around the Earth and see what was happening in Russia at the same time. And of course, it allowed us to see things from a 360-degree view, right? So how did we see the Vietnam War from every single country on the Earth, right? How did we see it 10 years before it happened, 10 years after it happened, 20 years after it happened? And this tool also allowed us to shop for knowledge, right? We were able to look at all the movies, all the sounds, all the fashion that were created at that time and save them for later. If the beginning of jazz interests us, we could put those things in our movie quay to watch later. The thing that I most loved about the 4D map was this ability to have a personal notebook. We realized we were living in an age where things were changing so much that we needed to become lifelong learners, right? We couldn't stop learning after high school or college, but we needed a digital notebook to keep notes on the theories we were working with and the questions and where we'd been in history. And we also needed a collaborative platform, right? We wanted to be able to collaborate all these questions that we had. And of course, the most popular thing that we did on this 4D map and that we do today is when the haptic suits and virtual reality really came into being, right? And we would create these fears, right? Or we would go into a simulation. And as you guys know, this was the first time we were able to create actual memories of history that we never even lived through, right? Because as you know in virtual reality, your brain processes information as if it's coming through your eyes. You're having a physical memory of doing something and your brain is recording memories deeply because you're in a special place, right? So we are, for the first time, able to feel history, not just read about it. So I wanna congratulate and thank all the people who came together over the last year to recreate the Chicago World's Fair for this conference, right? We're bringing back an event that happened 120 years ago, right? And we did it over the course of a year and it launched this year in 2027. Now, when this happened, it was considered the most spectacular attraction in the world at that time. People from every single age group and economic background came, 27 million people came here and all of the countries showed the latest and greatest of what they had. And when we created it, we had the 3D models but we had to do more than that. We had the objects, right? We already had those scanned in. We had the beautiful architecture but we had to add the objects, right? We had to let people order those on Amazon. And we needed to put people in there, right? We got 4,000 reenactment volunteers, some of them from Chicago, some of them from Gettysburg that you learned about the history, right? And they came and they became virtual avatars and staffed it 24 hours a day for three months, right? We also had 13,000 chatbot, virtual reality, AI-powered performers, right? And then, of course, 16 million everyday people who came to experience it. We had virtual souvenirs, people taking home woolly mammoths. And my personal highlights were hearing the first voice recording from the Edison machine, right? And my body still hurts from trying to learn how to belly dance in the street of Cairo, right? And then there's a super washer-upper, right? The very first dishwasher invented by a female inventor. And I also liked attending as different people, different age groups, different classes. And, you know, no joke, my parents said, we're so glad you're working on this, because did you know your great-grandmother and great-great and great-great-great-grandmother all went to this? They were part of the 27 million people that had gone. The biggest attractions, of course, were the very first Ferris Wheel. And then Captain Creeper, 85, way back in the year 2016, had recreated all 200 buildings in Minecraft, pixels, right? And he allowed every day, everybody to come in and take the buildings apart and put them back together, okay? How's that for learning architecture? Of course, Buffalo Bill and Annie Oakley stole the show like they did way back then. So we always look at where people go after they leave the simulation, right? On the timeline map, right? And a lot of people, of course, they just took the ships from the simulation off to Europe, right? And they also went back 400 years and took the ships back to the U.S. They took the railroads in Chicago and started exploring the historical present from that time, 1893, across the U.S. They also went back in time 20 years. They wanted to see the fire of Chicago, right? The 18,000 buildings that got destroyed. And they wanted to go forward in time and go to the Venice Biennale and other things. We started a lot of collaborative research. You guys all probably participated in some of it. We started to compare the Industrial Revolution to the Robotics Revolution, right? And talking about eight-hour workday versus the four-day workweek that we have today, right? And we wanted to know why the other worlds failed. You know, we're still theorizing about that. And we're also talking about doing another one for the future, right? So we can invite everybody today to learn about the latest and greatest technology that we have at our disposal. And we also ask the question, you know, do people have cultural experiences in virtual reality? Are they more curious in real life to have other cultural experiences? We had almost half a million media checkouts in the form of books and music. So I want to go back to the year 2017, 2015 about there, right? Let's go back. You know, we had the library, right? It looks like this. It wasn't digital. You couldn't reconfigure it based on the questions that you had at that moment, right? And it didn't include media types. It didn't include fashion. It didn't include music. This, believe it or not, this is what our search engines looked like back then, right? It wasn't able to visualize data, right? We wasn't organized on time and place, which we know we needed to do. And as my son says, you can't even navigate it using a ship, right? It's flat. So we started to understand that time was a dimension, right? It was a contextual filter by which we could understand the world. And if we changed that vantage point, we changed our understanding of history itself and what had happened. So at that time, we really didn't have any personal research tools that could help us, like I said, come up with new ideas and theories and trace our journey. And people at that time, they wanted to observe. They didn't want to be told what to think or what happened in history. They wanted to get in there and make up their own minds, right? They wanted to stop being disconnected and start being engaged. And they also wanted collaborative tools. There was nothing out there. Today, we can write a thesis using computers and 1,000 people, right? Citizen historians, citizen preservationists can all come together and work on a big project together. The preservation tools were ridiculous. We started with cave drawings. We go into drawings. Then we have photographs. And the scanning technology back in 2017 was still pretty expensive, right? So new tools arrived, right? We had haptic suits. We had virtual reality. We had augmented reality. We had world-building tools. We had the non-organics, right? The computers were there to help us at last. Cell phone scanners. We were moving preservation into the wisdom age, right? We were giving things more contextual relationship, interdependencies, influence. We're starting to see things differently. And all of our goals and passions started to deepen in ways that we didn't even imagine. So I want to talk about the lead-up to the four-dimensional map, right? So, you know, in the year 2000, we had people starting to experiment with scanners, right? Like Epic Scan and Architectural Resources Group. They were lugging up 200 pounds of LIDAR scanners to try to get these buildings scanned. And we had geniuses, right? That were like, like, Jimmy Wales creating open-source, crowdsourced encyclopedias? I mean, that was a crazy idea. But it was beautiful, and it worked. Okay, we had people trying to build virtual worlds. In 2012, we had holographic Holocaust victims that you could ask any question to. They had almost 20,000 responses, ready to go, based on whatever you wanted to ask. You know, Google Tango was starting to understand how a small cell phone could understand depth using 3D sensors. We were starting to scan and print things in 3D. The Cultural Institute of Google was taking all of the museums and all the cultural artifacts and seeing what could be done. Sure. We can also then plot it by time, which obviously, you know, for the data geek in me is very fascinating, and you can spend hours looking at every decade and the contributions in that decade and in those years for art, history, and cultures. You know, we would love to spend hours showing you each and every decade, but we don't have the time right now. So you can go on your phone and actually do it yourself. We were starting to add augmented reality sculptures next to regular sculptures, right, of things that had happened in history that were missed, right? And we had these things like the paper monuments that Brian talked about. We're starting to have massive amounts of 3D objects available to look and touch and hold and move around and try on. And we were starting to have consumer cell phones have the scale to be able to move around and gain in capability in the depth sensors, right? And that completely changed the equation. You know, 23 in me started showing people that their DNA included Neanderthal. Like, I'm 2% Neanderthal, right? People started realizing the genetic code in their body had all of their great-grandmothers all the way back through time, right? People wanted the historical stories to go along with that. And there was a renewed interest in history and preservation. In 2019, we had a big celebration. We launched the 4D map. And we started to have things like startups, like EV realities, start to be able to do on-demand collaborative crowd participation preservation with 360 cameras. We'd say, oh, there's a storm coming in. Let's preserve that. We'd send a call out to everybody, and you'd start getting hundreds of people starting to scan and preserve a certain environment. And then Brittany Heller started the before movement, right? We started to say, like, where do we need to document, right? They started to realize that images of before a war and putting those two images together was a really powerful statement. By 2020, we had 900 registered users. Things were still moving fairly slowly, but we had 100 people that were crowd sourcing theories on preservation and history. In 2021, we had the Airbnb Rite of History, where people could drop their cell phones and be given costumes and food of the time period, and they could totally immerse themselves in another place, in these incredible buildings that we'd worked so hard to preserve. By 2021, all of the major content providers were giving us leads into their data, right? So then we could really shop for knowledge in a way that we hadn't before. And in 2020, to StoryCorps, this incredible project to record thousands and thousands of oral histories were now available at every bus stop, right? So you could start listening. What happened here? You could start listening to stories of what happened around you at that given moment. By 2026, people didn't want to go to the movies. They wanted to immerse themselves in the story world themselves. Things were starting to change. And as you know, by 2026, historians and preservationists were starting to help us make good decision about our present, right? When was history repeating itself? What could we look at that could change the outcome of a very pressing presence? So I want to close by taking a look at where we are in time, right? You know, humans just got here, right? Just barely got here. And we've gone through these ages, right? These paradigm shifts, right? They're coming faster. We're basically experiencing for the first time this idea of exponential change, right? That things are moving much more quickly than we had ever before. This is discoveries on the periodic table. We're discovering, I think, four more we're added this year. This shows you visually the speed at which we've been able to travel over time, right? So we've ran, that's for 200,000 years, it's the fastest we could go. Then we rode horses for 5,000 years, that's the fastest we could go. And then all of a sudden we invented the car, right? And then, you know, when we got here, right? And then we've gone to outer space, 18,000 miles per hour, right? So this is what that looks like. And if we add back in the running, whoops, we're there. You guys were born in this small circle. So let's come back down to today, right now, 2017. We are about to bring preservation and history into a very personal world, right? Because digitization allows us to do that, right, for the first time ever. And we also are going to swing things back into the big picture, right? So that the work you're doing locally, together, combines into a bigger, more interesting story, right? We, it is our role to bring other experts to the table, right? The technical people that are figuring all this technology out, right, are in their basements, and they're just excited that they've got it working, right? And you guys over here have this beautiful why of why you're doing that, right? And if we get everybody at the table, we can really make magic happen, right? We can give this technology a chance and we can give this technology a purpose and a path forward, right? And we also have to keep in mind that the preservationists that are going to be coming along in five years are going to be everyday people, right? They're going to have their cell phones. They're going to be telling stories. They're going to be preserving what's important. So if we're going to be pouring exponential technology and rocket fuel, we want to make sure that we're not doing that on the world we have today, right? We don't want the world's day times a thousand. We want to make some adjustments, right, and then scale that up, right? So if we're moving this fast on this bullet train, right, our navigational system and the choices and the decisions that we make are critical. And that's why I want all of you guys in the cockpit, right? You can synthesize the past. You could help us make better decisions. By bringing up context and bringing up understanding, we can bring the world into the wisdom age. Thank you. And now please welcome to stage our trust live responders Kevin Ponto and Mike Ruth and moderator Susan West Montgomery. I feel like I'm in the cockpit now. Thank you, Zanka. I asked Zanka to challenge us. I asked her to show us the possibilities of the work that we do and how using these technologies that we can start to apply them to our work. And we've got a lot to talk about now. So I wanted to start. We have both Kevin and Mike are very involved in the sort of practical applications of these technologies. But they too have experienced this exponential quick change where things happen so quickly, as Zanka tried to say from 2017 to 2028, all that was able to happen, what the story she spooled out for you. So I want to ask Kevin, how are you seeing the future happening that quickly in the work that you do and so that the future is here? Thank you so much. So I've been working in the VR realm for about 10 years. And I'm a professor at the University of Wisconsin Madison. We built a VR room in which you go in. Everything's 3D projected. That room cost about $1 million. So seven years ago, you wanted a VR facility, $1 million. You wanted something to put around your heads, tens of thousands of dollars. Come to today, you can get these things for $300. If you wanted to use Google Cardboard, you're looking at $6. So you can really see this ramp up of accessibility. And I think one of the things that's really interesting is if we look back at the computer. In the 1950s, the computer is this huge, large thing. It occupies a room. Very few people get to use it. The people that are using it are expected to be doing science. You're not doing anything fun. And something really interesting happens when you go from that model to the computers going into the homes. And I think we're just starting to see that for the field of VR, where we're starting to see the accessibility really spur innovation in this field. Can you give us an example of that? Sure. So one of the things that we're really looking at in my lab and work is capturing real-world spaces. And our lab started by doing this for the purposes of health care. When we think about health care, we oftentimes think about hospitals and operating rooms. They're nice. They're clean and organized. But we're really interested in the home environment. And people's homes are oftentimes cluttered and chaotic. But people are very good at managing their health in these environments. And so we captured these environments. We ran people through in VR. We were able to test a bunch of hypotheses. And this has spurred us into lots of different directions, one of them being cultural heritage, but another one being crime scene investigation. And so we've worked with the FBI, local sheriff's office, and using the same methodology that we're using to study home health, to study crime scene investigations, homicide cases, and really envision a new way that we might do CSI in the future. Cool. Cool. And that idea of going into the home and being able to really understand the world that the person is living in for health care, documenting that, and then helping them make choices in their own health care that is responsive to the environment in which they are in. It's very revolutionary. And the applications, you can only talk about health care, but there's millions of applications of that, for sure. Mike, certainly in the GIS realm, it's changing very quickly. Right. It will surprise nobody to know that we have a similar trajectory of progress. When I started doing mapping and GIS and geographic information system work 30 some years ago, as the oldest person on the stage here, I can say maps were 2D. We had two-dimensional maps. Not long ago, we had three-dimensional maps. We were able to add the elevation dimension to that. Maps used to be done only on isolated desktop computers, and now they're being done in the web. Five years ago, that was very difficult to do. And I am very impressed that so many of your exhibits, Senko, were maps and 4D maps. And today, 4D maps exist, but you need to be kind of a specialist to be able to do spatiotemporal cubes and analysis of time and space forward and backward. But you're inspiring me to think that by 2028, we're going to be there. And it'll be consumer grade. And with consumer grade, as you're pointing out, Kevin, you get more uptake. With more uptake comes more fascination, more innovation, more scaling, and reduction in costs. So things that used to be difficult. Web mapping almost didn't exist five years ago, and now it's ubiquitous. And many of you have come by our booth already today and looked at some of the examples of how we're using the internet now to inspire collaboration. Can you show some examples of real? Yeah, I'll show some three-dimensional stuff. I feel a little inadequate that I don't have any 4D exhibits to show. This is kind of a sad moment for me, really. Maybe that's your purpose in all of this. Let's look at the 3D view, perspective view. So today with 3D now, we can model terrain. We can model shadows. We can model areas, in this case, that are from the corner of that building. We can see what's visible. We can see what's shadowed. We can use that now. That intelligence is running in real time. This is not a time lapse. This is an analysis. You can drive your analysis with your mouse. You can look at and fine tune the precision of this. If you want to build a building, you can model that building and throw it up in place and see what gets shadowed by it. Show another example? Yeah, we've got another example here. So another thing that's happened, if we can look at the city view here. So this is San Francisco. It's going to appear a little bit more here in a moment in less than a minute. Now again, if we use open street map data with building footprints, if we've got attributes that describe a little bit about the purpose of the building, the elevation of the building, we can assign rules to the renderer and generate these views in a minute. Now, many of you may have done this before and taken weeks, months, even years to produce this kind of a model that now with the popularization of data, the democratization of data through, for example, open street map and other open sources, we can all harness this intense reality generation in consumer-grade software. Amazing, amazing that that can happen in a minute. And suddenly, you've populated, you've created a whole community, and then the kinds of manipulations you can do to make choices about the future of that community. Some assembly required. Some assembly required. I think what is a thread through all of this is this notion of why. So we have these technologies, and I think what Zanka was able to capture is all these really amazing applications, but toward what end. And so I'd actually like you to reflect a little bit. I mean, I think we got that a little bit in your speech, but why would we do this? Why do we need 4D mapping? What will change about the way we do our work that is so important to use these technologies? Yeah, I mean, I think the world has gotten more complex because we have computers to help us do that, right? Before, it was like you could really only print one book or one person was in charge of remembering all the stuff to tell everybody. But now we need better tools to help us look at problems so in different ways. Because remember, anything that's not future-proofed and change tolerant is not going to be a good tool for us five years from now. So we essentially need to build Legos and creation tools for people to constantly ask all the new questions that they're going to come up with with all the new permutations. We're in a complex world. And I was struck a lot about when you talked about being able to see history from so many different vantage points. So you're seeing it from different places, so looking at the Vietnam War from different places, but also through the music, through the art, through the history. And when we had this conversation earlier, Kevin's work, which gets to the minuscule documentation of space, it's almost like prescriptive preservation or predictive preservation. Yeah, and one of the really interesting things, so one of our projects, we went into homes in Wisconsin, we scanned them, we brought them in as a stimulus. So everyone in our experiments could experience the exact same house, see the exact same amount of clutter and chaos. But this year, we're going to be releasing all of those to the public, and one of the things I thought that's really interesting about it is that it is a 3D model of a house. We haven't done anything. It's basically on the order of millimeter accurate, but it's all of the mundane minutiae that is in the house. So you think about, usually, we capture things that we think are exciting or important, and those are the things we photograph. But we have all the stuff just laying around, and we have this kind of time capsule of, here's what a house looked like in 2014. That's just going to be there, and it's digital, so it's not gonna age, and we'll be able to go back and look at this. So I think it's a complete side effect of this project, but something that's really excited me about it. I think all of us have experience as preservation, just trying to go back and look at household records or construction documents and things to try to piece together all that minutiae, because the minutiae did not make it forward, and this actually allows for that going forward. What we do with it all is gonna be the other question. You wanna speak to that a little bit? Do you have any sense of what we will do with it all? I think that's a really interesting and open question, and I kind of look at this community as people who may know better than I would even in terms of some of the great applications. Well, certainly some of what we're all trying to do is make better decisions, avoid stupidity. It's the holy grail, but that's what we're all trying to do. We're trying to use evidence for that purpose. Evidence is such as captured in a building of a lidar reconstruction of a room in 2014, or evidence such as you're capturing in your inventories of historic properties or archeological finds, and how to create something that is somewhat future-proof. Now, to be future-proof, information needs to be accessible. It needs to be scalable. It needs to have a known budget for precision. You've gotta be confident that the information you're using is authoritative, that it represents reality in a way that you can build your decision on, and that comes to why I'm here, or in a sense why Esri's here, is to help provide that platform in the service of your activity. Now, we serve other things. We're not just, I don't mean to diminish this, we're not specifically an historic preservation platform, but I love your Lego set metaphor. You can take all these tools of the platform and construct them into a workflow that serves decision support for historic preservation or for alternative site analysis or design charrette. Design charrettes, maybe many of you have done those. You have 10 people in a room and you're looking at different design alternatives. We wanna be able to do that better, faster, cheaper, more precisely, more scalably in a resilient platform, and maybe with the designers in Nairobi, Singapore, Chicago, and Seattle all working together on a common platform. That collaborative thing, I think, again Zeng had talked about, is how can we use this to be talking to each other? And I think those of us that have been here for a couple of days, this idea of the community engagement piece, how do we really begin to have conversations with the people that are most affected by the work we do? So do you wanna just, I think you have quite a vision about how this collaboration can happen once we have the tools. Yeah, I mean, I think that in this day and age people wanna find the personal thread. Like what's it to me? Why do I care? So unless you really tap into that with people, then you can tell the broader story. And I think that, you know, Mike said, some assembly required. You know, at the early stage of doing this collaborative stuff, it's totally messy, right? You have to show people how to do it well. You have to invite people to do it wrong. You know what I mean? Like it has to, it is kind of messy. And it's why I think that we all need to share what we're working on if we build a collaborative tool and we're passionate about it because it applies to what we're doing in our specific thing. Well, that tool can just be resurfaced and handed to another city and say, try this in your city. Just rename the call and how it was done. So we need to start building up these tools because the collaboration piece really hasn't figured out. And I think visualizing the data that we collect and letting people access it is gonna be part of the interesting challenge to it. So it's kind of a new field and it's complicated and messy and it takes communities. But I think once you bring preservation in with other goals that people have, other themes, whether it's music or whatever it is, people start to get interested and they start to embrace both things at the same time. Well, we had a session called Music as the Great Connector. You are not, the three of you are not afraid of technology. And I'm not suggesting that people in the audience are, but this does start to stretch it a little bit. Like what does this really mean for the day-to-day work that I have to do? I have to talk to my city council. I have to convince the funder to fund my work. I have to get the person not to tear down the building. I guess I'll just quickly to talk about your perspective about embracing technology and not being fearful of it. And of course, this is your job, you work at this. Again, the folks out here, our day-to-day jobs are not about this. But when you talked about having technologists and preservations in the same room to create these. So I just would like you to reflect on how you have come to not be afraid because, and why you think technology is something that we can embrace and we'll be able to transfer into that day-to-day work that all these people are involved in. Let me tee this up for you, if you don't mind. Sure, okay, sure. I've spent the last couple of years working with the Washington State Shippo on a full conversion. Allison Brooks's vision has been to fully convert all paper workflows into all digital workflows. The effect of that has been actually a reduction in cost. So the business case has to support the innovation. They've changed the review process for Section 106 from a 30-day process to a four-day process to in many cases a one-day process. So this is an example of harnessing technology. And sure, maybe there are people who would rather be on a typewriter with carbon paper, but that business case is gone. And I think we need to really look at how we can do things that used to be difficult and are now possible and harnessing those for the good. And my question for you is I've been involved a little bit in LIDAR and looking at the complexity of developing 3D views. Can you define LIDAR for that? LIDAR, laser imaging, detection, and arranging. And let me ask you, how do you create LIDAR objects now and how was that compared to years ago? I mean, so in LIDAR scanning is really interesting because LIDAR scanning in some ways captures a very good static view of this environment. And it's different than 360 videos in the sense of when we create these models, you can go and choose an arbitrary viewpoint. Having said that, we still are at the stage currently where if I wanna make an interactive version of this room where I can swing off the banisters and throw chairs around, that still requires a lot of artistic skills. And so my analogy is there used to be a day in which if you wanted to create a view of this room that you would have to have a painter or a set of artistic skills and the average person really couldn't capture this room. And photographs come about and now all of us can put up our phone or our camera and capture a representation of this room. And we're starting to see a push toward that for VR. We're not quite there yet though. And so we still have this kind of interesting mode where we can capture things but it still requires someone to go in and manipulate it. It requires somebody to kind of massage the data and play with it. Doing something? I mean, I would just say this. Nobody knows what to do with preservation and virtual reality yet. Because nobody's done it yet. We're just at the beginning. And wherever you step in, like they say, it's gonna be easier and easier because they're making it easier and easier. So don't be scared that you're behind because you're not. And don't be ever scared because really it's kind of like a need to know basis. You have a challenge. And it's also not about the technology. The stories you're telling and the things you're preserving, that's really the heart of it. You can't just throw technology and make it awesome. So once you figure out what your objectives are, you figure out what tools to use and you just try it and you just experiment because there are no rule books and it's gonna be clumsy at first. One of the things I recommend that people just block out two hours a week. Block out two hours a week just to sit and read about what people are doing or call up a company and say, you have a VR rig, can I come and try it out? You know what I mean? Like it's really just about getting your toes wet and then doing that every week. You know what I mean? Because this stuff, what you typed in the search engine last month about virtual reality cameras or whatever is totally different than what you're gonna type in and the results you're gonna get the next month, right? So it's all kind of a moving target. Don't worry about knowing everything. You're not gonna master it. Nobody's gonna master it. It's a moving target. So just jump in. Jump in. Yeah. You touched upon something, virtual reality, I think raises some challenges of course because we are about real places and all of our work, all the work we do is rooted in place. And we didn't talk about this earlier so I hope this doesn't throw you but that's what these trust lies are for. If we're rooted in real place but we're talking about virtual reality or simulations or talk a little, if you can, about the connection between the real place and the kind of work that you're doing. You want me to go? Sure. You nodded vigorously. Oh, sure. I can take it to you. Okay, I'll let you start. Oh, I think, well let me give an example of a time in which we've done this. There was a church in Mount Horobo, Wisconsin and it was being torn down and before it was torn down, we sent our team out, we scanned it, created a full 3D model of it it was torn down, it was actually moved to Norway and reconstructed but we created a little virtual reality exhibition at the museum there and had an opening and the owner of the previous building before it was torn down went through it in virtual reality and came out of there and was just tears all over their eyes and she basically had this experience of going back to a place that no longer exists. And so I think one of the real potentials of virtual reality is creating these experiences for things that don't exist anymore and also trying to create a new type of accessibility so we've also gone around the state and tried to show people things like Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin for people who can't ever go there and give them this experience that they just can't physically do anymore. The ethical question that's raised by that perhaps though is that if we can experience it virtually does that enhance the value of those places that more people will be exposed to Taliesin and therefore the chance of Taliesin surviving is greater or will it be well I can do it virtually so I don't and I don't know if you know the answer to that but that it seems to me is the ethical question. Yeah, it doesn't really matter anymore because when you're in virtual reality and your body is processing it as if you're actually there we blur the lines between reality and simulation. I know that's hard to conceive of but we'll never be able to I mean having the real place is always going to be better, right? We're hoping. No, of course, you know, I mean well, in a sense, in a sense it is but it's for different things. It's an and and a both, right? I think we're gonna create interest in preserving more places by showing, you know, oh, here's the investor put this thing on go see this, look at how amazing this is do you want this to be gone? No, but you can also go in that space that Frank Lloyd Wright house and you can read your favorite book in it. How cool is that? Or you can hear all the sounds that were around there so it's a different experience, it doesn't replace it it's just an and and a both and I think that it's gonna potentiate the entire preservation movement in a really, really great way. I guess I'll make a very quick comment. Of course. I'll just say, I mean, I had seen the Mona Lisa, I don't know, hundreds of times digitally but when I went to Paris, I wanted to go see it in person and so I think to a certain degree what we're thinking about is we've had 2D digital images for a long time and I think we've gotten very accustomed to the idea of the difference between a digital 2D representation and a physical 2D representation and I think we're just starting to play with this idea of what does this mean to have a 3D digital representation? Yeah, yeah. Did you want to do that in person because you thought the experience of the painting was gonna be different or because you wanted to walk through the toilery garden and feel the plain trees and go into the Louvre Museum through the special entrance and have that entire experience maybe with a baguette in your backpack? No, I think it's a great question. I mean, I think there's something about the human experience of physically being in a place with something that's very different than just having this view from afar. And much of that's anticipatory, much of that's peripheral and you can do that in virtual reality and would it be nice to have done that maybe in the day that Napoleon was living in the Louvre and of course the painting wasn't there then, I mean, I'm mixing my metaphor but with that San Francisco skin, that San Francisco one minute city, we could re-skin that to be San Francisco in 1905 and now we've got a time machine essentially where you were talking about your Airbnb, your Spatial Temple Airbnb, which is a fascinating idea and then have experiences that augment the perception of things that we take for granted. And what's all that's in a platform? What's all that's accessible and it's not a 2028 notion or prediction if I will grab that, I don't say fantasy, but what's all that's in a platform? We're gonna find all kinds of other ways that that's gonna become applicable to our experiences and our perceptions. Wonderful, wonderful. I guess as we started to think about wrapping up here, you know, one of the reasons I wanted to do this session was I wanted us to get out ahead of the thinking about technology, not to be the passive like, oh, this is the latest thing, how does that apply to preservation, but really start to kind of vision what we might want to have happen and then encourage the technologists to create that for us. So I just in your own work ask you to kind of wave a magic wand to maybe to have us start to think about it that way. What would you want in the next five years? I mean, again, Zengas pulled out a quite ambitious agenda that's very close to being real, but in the next five years, what would you like to see the progress in your own fields be? And I'm sure you're already imagining it because that's who you are. Madam. You wanna go first? Sure, I guess I'd like to see ubiquitous digital data. We're already digitizing everything in five years, maybe we'll be further along in that. And then we'll have these vast archives of data. We may feel overload, but overload is maybe a technology problem. It's a problem of curation. It's a problem of metadata. It's a problem of understanding what the value points are of this ubiquitous digital data and how to use that effectively. And I'd also like to see ubiquitous collaboration. I'd like to have a, I know it sounds like a bad, brave new world sort of scenario, but I'd like to have the ability to dial up anybody that I'm working with and not have to take a plane, take the low carbon approach and collaborate with them using that digital data, mashing it up, creating new analysis, new insights from that data to support decisions more quickly and more accurately. Now, we think we're getting there and the web is certainly the metaphor for that. Right. Yeah, I mean, I feel like a lot's being left on the table right now in terms of our potential as preservationists, right? There's not a lot of money to preserve these things, but we've got a lot, we're in the knowledge age, right? Knowledge is important, it can save you money. And we've also, you know, time is really valuable, right? You've got a lot of people who are retired or who want to be part of something that's bigger than them. And I wish that we had more creative scaffolding that would engage people into this preservation so that we can take advantage of all these incredible resources of our own personal knowledge and in our own personal time. I think I would really like to see us move to being able to capture more dynamic spaces. I mean, Linear is really great for a static environment. 360 Video works really well for dynamic scenes, but both of them have trade-offs. If we could have something in which I could really simply just capture this room and relive this whole event, I think that's something that would be really powerful. So what would your advice to this audience about what they should be doing in the next day when they leave here to begin to start, to begin to realize this future? Multidisciplinary teams. Try to mash your organization up with technologists or other people because it can be a really powerful combination. That's great advice, I'm trying to think of. I would say from the things that you've both been saying and also from your presentation, and of course, this is no news to everybody here, but capture what you care about. It's not going to be there forever. Things are going to change. You're never gonna go back to that tree that you climbed in as a kid or that elementary school that meant so much to you, but if those things are captured, you can begin to create some resonance with people in the future, explain to them what it was, and store those things for the posterity. I'm struck by that idea, and again, it was in Zanka's presentation, but we don't have to be the technologists. That's not why we're here necessarily. We have the stories. We have the places. We have the history. We have the passion for these places. If we're mashed up with people who have these kinds of visions, and that's exactly sort of what you said about what Ezri does and what the work that you do. It's not, it's not, you're not working necessarily to save places, but you are creating the opportunity to save places through the work you do. So with that, I would like to thank you so much for being part of this conversation, and I hope we can continue the conversation. We have several sessions that are devoted to technology. We've had quite a few today, and there's more tomorrow. And I hope that this has challenged you to think about our work in a different way, and get out, have us think about how to get out in front of the technology, and be the creators of the solutions going forward. Thank you. Thank you.