The educational affordances of navigable time

The two key New Media forms of database and navigable space are widely used by cultural heritage institutions. Digital databases are integral to the modern museum, not least for their critical role in museum websites. Virtual Heritage harnesses the navigable space of virtual reality to deliver interactive Virtual Heritage worlds. Navigable time however is a barely recognised and rarely implemented affordance of New Media with particular relevance to Heritage. The Virtual Sydney Rocks is a prototype time-based Virtual Heritage environment that supports two different modes of virtual time travel. Users can instantaneously go to a particular time or they can set a speed of time and see a time-lapse of the changing environment over a 200 year time span. These destination-focused and journey-focused modes of virtual time travel offer different but complementary learning opportunities for users. The modern constructivist museum recognises that people construct knowledge by integrating new knowledge into existing knowledge. Given the wide range of museum visitors, from family groups to individuals, from young to old and from expert to uninformed, it is important for museums to offer multiple modes of engagement and pathways to knowledge. Destination-focused virtual time travel allows users to travel in a temporally disjointed fashion that is the antithesis of the linear narrative of heritage. Time-lapsed virtual time travel however re-instates the temporal order and allows users to see the changes that occur over time. The combination of the two helps users develop a deep understanding of a place over time. Time-based virtual heritage is in the very early stages of development and more research is clearly needed, but early indications are that navigable time provides engaging, powerful and popular learning opportunities to museum audiences.