German Consul General Dr. Rudiger Lotz and Goethe Institute Pakistan Director Simone Lenz officially opened the library on Thursday.
The Goethe Institut Pakistan has established a virtual information centre at the Alliance Francaise. The “Infinite Library,” as it is known, provides visitors with knowledge on various subjects through a virtual reality (VR) experience.
German Consul General Dr. Rudiger Lotz and Goethe Institute Pakistan Director Simone Lenz officially opened the library on Thursday.
Mika Johnson, the creative director of The Infinite Library and a multimedia artist by trade, said the virtual library was created by a team of 20 people, including experts in various fields such as Polynesian navigation, European alchemy, and South Indian puppetry.
He described the library as multi-sensory. “It means that when you visit this library, you will have many different experiences through various senses. Video and sound are two of them.” Visitors can put on headphones and converse with the library’s artificial intelligence.
Visitors can “intimately connect with the library,” according to Johnson, who added that they had taken stories from various periods of time and placed them in a virtual space where they could be experienced.
There are also 3D print jars in the library. The library would use a QR code to ask visitors to play a game or explore the house via a mobile phone application. If the visitor chooses to play games, the library will request that they look for cosmic origins and explain how the cosmic origin began with dust.
The virtual information room would then explain how our planet came to be 4.5 billion years ago. The game tells the story of how asteroids formed 200 million years ago and brought water with them through different periods of evolutionary history. It also discusses cyanobacteria, the first form of life to release oxygen into the atmosphere.
“All of these stories from our biodiversity are in the library,” the creative director explained. The library also has a 60,000-year-old flute replica.
“We associate libraries with actual physical buildings, books, or other forms of media,” Johnson said, adding that the Infinite Library was a completely different type of library in which visitors would put on a VR headset and be transported to a vast cave.
There would be pools of water, and visitors would float in them to learn about things like cosmic origins and the eight phases of the moon.
He claims that the library brings together the world’s religious and magical traditions, as well as science and science fiction. He went on to say that he was a religious studies scholar who had also read about magical tradition, astrology, alchemy, and other topics.