Democratizing Access to Historical Stereoscopic Photographs through AI and Virtual Reality

Encoding the Image: How does AI affect the Future of Photo History? is a conference presented by The Image Centre at Toronto Metropolitan University, in partnership with pictorIA and High Vision.

This session is led by Dhruva Gowda Storz and titled Democratizing Access to Historical Stereoscopic Photographs through AI and Virtual Reality.

Abstract
Stereoscopic photography—the earliest 3D immersive medium—was immensely popular in the 19th and 20th centuries, leaving behind vast collections of stereographs in archives worldwide. These artefacts offer unparalleled three-dimensional windows into historical events, cultures, and perspectives. Despite widespread digitization, stereography's reliance on specialized viewing devices to reproduce the stereo illusion limits the full realization of their immersive affordances when disseminating them through conventional digital modalities. Virtual reality offers promising avenues for revitalizing these collections for contemporary audiences, but the laborious and prohibitively expensive task of manually preparing and restoring stereographs for comfortable viewing in VR at scale is an obstacle to broader dissemination, necessitating new solutions. This research project responds to these challenges by exploring how AI and Image processing can be responsibly used to develop a specialized open-source toolkit for disseminating stereographs through VR. Developed through dialogue with archivists and restoration professionals, the toolkit's core is a modular pipeline for restoring and processing stereographs for VR at scale. The toolkit additionally examines how state-of-the-art AI augmentation methods can be leveraged to imagine novel visualization and interaction paradigms for the medium, facilitating new and effective modes of widespread public access while preserving its historical authenticity and integrity.

Bio
Dhruva Gowda Storz is a PhD candidate at the Laboratory for Experimental Museology (eM+) under the direction of Professor Sarah Kenderdine at EPFL, Switzerland. Dhruva holds a BSc in Physics and Neuroscience from Maastricht University and an MSc in Artificial Intelligence from Imperial College London. He has worked in a variety of roles at both scientific and cultural institutions, where he has led the development of platforms such as LEKHA.cc, an online DIY archive for artists. His early exposure to art and museums in his formative years, his education, and his work have crystallized a keen interest in the intersection of culture and computing, which he explores at eM+ through his interdisciplinary PhD research on visualizing and disseminating historical stereographic photographs through virtual reality.