Memory Eternal | Вічна Пам'ять [Download for Windows + VR headsets]

Memory Eternal | Вічна Пам'ять is a virtual reality (VR) world by the Decameron Collective. In the wake of crises, what should we remember, and how? Named after the Ukrainian Orthodox prayer for the dead, the Canadian feminist Decameron Collective's Memory Eternal is a single user Virtual Reality work featuring seventeen distinct storytelling works including 360 video, interactive and spatialized sound, AI generated images and video, film, and text. Set in a surreal and watery landscape inspired by the classical underworld, a space of memory bounded by the rivers of Woe, Lamentation, and Forgetfulness, the works investigate our shared experiences of grief and loss at personal, societal, and planetary scales. Memory Eternal is distributed as an executable digital download, and is designed to work with virtual reality headsets with hand controllers. It was first exhibited, and has been most extensively tested with the Meta Quest 2 virtual reality headset and hand controllers. It was developed in Unity, a cross-platform game engine, and coded in C#. Users can move freely through the fully immersive VR environment using the hand controllers as well as head and body movements. Users activate the media artworks installed within the Memory Eternal virtual world by pointing the laser that appears from the hand controller when they approach an artwork and then clicking the grip on the controller. Users can pick up and hold the tablets and magnifying glasses installed in the world by clicking and holding the grip. For more details see the Memory Eternal Controllers Diagram.