CRYPT — digital platform / storytelling / immersive experiences

Crypt is a history education platform that helps cemetery visitors learn about local history by immersing them in spontaneously generated stories based on gravestone inscriptions.

Unless they were famous or influential individuals, the life stories of most people are lost to us—encrypted in the ground. Crypt partners with local historians to algorithmically give some life to the memory of these people with stories from the times that they lived in.

After determining birth/death years as well as gender and other details from the inscriptions on a gravestone, Crypt composes a story about the significant events this person might have seen and the possible lives they might have led.

The story is not about the actual individual buried there, but about how life might have been like for someone with their attributes.

The Crypt database contains story-building-blocks about a variety of semi-fictional characters living in the centuries the cemetery existed in. These stories are written and tagged by our local historian partners.

Based on the data from the gravestone inscription, Crypt selects and stitches together the story-building-blocks that are most relevant to the person buried there.

The goal is to create more engagement with local history from a human-centered perspective while being immersed in the final resting place of a person who existed during that time.

Local historians create story-building-blocks.

Our first stakeholder is the local historian and we engage with them through the story creation interface. The interface has templates that provide constraints for creativity during the process of writing the story-building blocks while keeping the database manageable. As these templates are filled out, the story-building-blocks get tagged with relevant keywords.

Here we see that a historian has chosen to create a story about a soldier in the first Schleswig war, which took place in 1864.

Cemetery visitor captures data from gravestone.

The second stakeholder is the cemetery visitor. They use the mobile interface here to engage with the grave of a male who was born in 1846, a person would have been of serving age in the year 1864.

That information fits perfectly with the tags of the story-building-block about about the Soldier in the First Schleswig war and it’s called up.

Additional information can be deduced from gravestone inscriptions in countries where last names might signify one’s social class or even occupation.

Crypt generates story and scores it.

The selected story building block is chained up with another one that has similar tags. Then additional story prefixes such as “When he was around your age” are added if the cemetery visitor’s age matches the character’s age range in the story. The combined text is narrated by an advanced speech synthesis tool that generates a human-like reading voice.

Music composed in that era is added to the track, matching the mood of the story text using a sentiment analysis algorithm.

The user interface for the cemetery visitor is minimal so as to never distract them from their environment. When a story starts playing, the interface goes dark to urge the visitor to look away from the phone and immerse themselves in the space.

The experience continues outside the cemetery to reinforce the learning that took place during the trip. The visitor can track significant stories they heard during their trips and continue reading more about the parts they are interested in.

Beyond dedicated history students, the audience for this experience could be any traveler looking for a different way to experience local history. History museums could extend their exhibits into the cemetery through these audio stories. Any old cemetery has the potential to essentially become a history museum with this platform.

Crypt could even be an inspiration tool for writers who are looking for characters from another time.

My research topic at the start of this process was Archeology of Us. I have a background in ancient anthropology and I’ve always been fascinated by tomb inscriptions and buried artifacts and what they have to tell us about daily lives of the ancients.

There were very specific prescriptions around burial and rituals of remembrance in ancient times — in my research I wanted to explore how we deal with these concepts in modern times.

I interviewed two people who had recently lost their loved ones. I also decided to start looking for inspiration from cemetery visitors and conducted guerrilla interviews with them.

I also conducted expert interviews with a funeral musician, a bereavement counselor and a curator at the Life and Death Institute in Copenhagen.

I learned that more and more people are avoiding funeral practices and hoping to be cremated and scattered at sea when they die. Cemeteries were starting to lose their significance as places of remembrance in our time. Having a specific geographical point for people to visit after we die didn’t seem to hold as much significance anymore, at least in Scandinavian society.

Based on the insights from research, I decided to shape my design question around redefining cemeteries to create new rituals, conversations and interactions around remembrance.

After rounds of ideation I came up with the concept of using data from gravestone inscriptions to remember the departed by encircling them with historical information.

In the first prototype, I tested non-fiction stories with historical facts versus fictional ones. Fictional stories captured the imagination of respondents more as they found it easier to empathize with a fictional person than a factual event.

In this prototype I used an audio interface controlled by voice as well as an object. The object allowed people to choose between fiction and non-fiction stories. I created audio tracks for the whole experience and played them via bluetooth, matching feedback sounds with the behavior of respondents. They were convinced that it was a working prototype.

For the second prototype, I tried adding a simple mobile interface. To trigger a story, the user needed to choose between scanning the inscription on the gravestone with the phone or saying the name on the gravestone out loud for speech recognition.

Saying the names out loud was preferable as it felt like an invocation for the story — but I also came to see that a voice only control doesn’t work so well for people who can’t pronounce Danish names, so a visual interface was going to be necessary.

For the third prototype, I tested out a higher fidelity user interface that combined voice as well as touch input but focused on keeping it as out of the way as possible.

I also tested how the screen could be used for a continuation of the experience when the visitor left the cemetery.

For an exhibit, I had to figure out a way to bring the cemetery to people because I couldn’t bring people to the cemetery. So I ended up experimenting with a VR version of the experience.

I made several trips to the cemetery with a 360 camera to try and capture various immersive elements of the experience.

What worked best were the versions that included another person appearing in the video, seemingly sharing the experience with the user. People found it more grounding.

Even still, the best way to experience Crypt is being present at the cemetery.