About Whispering Galleries

Whispering Galleries is an interactive artwork developed specifically for the city of New Haven by Brad Bouse and Amaranth Borsuk, the creators of Between Page and Screen, a book of augmented reality poems.

A work of interactive poetry, Whispering Galleries is inspired by a set of anonymous 1858-1859 diaries kept by a New Haven County shop clerk. Visitors to the New Haven Free Public Library, where Whispering Galleries will be on exhibit starting April 26, 2014, are invited to read and engage with the words of this figure, using their hands to capture the echoes of his voice through a virtual whispering gallery: a screen that allows us to simultaneously look into the past and see the present.

More information: press page.

Technology

Whispering Galleries is programmed in JavaScript and runs best in Chrome.

We use the Leap Motion's JavaScript SDK to track a reader's hand position.

The particles, text, and webcam image are rendered in a webGL canvas using shaders and Three.js, a 3D library for webGL.