Infinite knowledge: Virtual reality is reimagining libraries in the 21st century

'The Infinite Library' offers possibilities for exploration of knowledge and storytelling using modern technology.

At the turn of the new millennium, libraries were still the living rooms of cities. Here, a visitor relaxed, read a book or magazine and browsed online resources. Then came a wealth of web pages on people's palms through mobile devices, and book shelves shrank many times over.

Years later, the museums of knowledge are changing again. This time it is Virtual Reality (VR) headsets, QR codes, holograms and 3D-printed objects that have entered the hallowed library. And both visitors and librarians are excited at the possibilities.

To the question of what a future library will look like, a possible scenario was presented in a pioneering project launched earlier this week in Delhi. Called "The Infinite Library", the VR installation reimagining libraries in the 21st century tells the story of the universe through myths, ancient musical instruments, cave paintings, asteroids, space dust, bacteria and fungi, and even leather puppetry from Karnataka.

Mika Johnson, the creative director of the travelling VR installation. (Photo credit: Jussi Manni)

A travelling installation

"Our goal is to host different kinds of knowledge systems that can't go into books," says Mika Johnson, creative director of The Infinite Library. Instead of books, The Infinite Library has jars with QR codes containing 3D-printed objects like mushrooms, fishbones, rocks and skulls representing each stage of evolution. "If you scan a QR code, you get a story about asteroids, bacteria and space dust," adds Johnson, a Prague-based multimedia artist.

A travelling exhibition, the VR library installation, which opened at the Goethe-Institut/Max Mueller Bhavan in Delhi on March 23, will go from the national capital to Bangalore (March 31-April 4) before heading to Prague in the Czech Republic (April-May) and Dublin in Ireland (July). The exhibition will return to South Asia for a tour in Dhaka, Chennai, Mumbai, Kolkata, Pune, Colombo and Karachi in September-October this year. It will also be exhibited in Tehran, Iran.

"I saw a cave with fire and also a beach that looked real. I was enjoying it," says Vandana Tiwari, a visitor to the VR artwork. "VR is a completely different learning. It is not boring," adds Tiwari, a Delhi-based German language student. "We are used to new technologies today. I use my mobile phone and laptop everyday."

The idea for The Infinite Library was born during another VR installation mounted at the Goethe-Institut library in 2019. VRwandlung, the installation based on Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis, allowed fans of the famous writer to enter the home of the book's character Gregor Samsa, a travelling salesman who wakes up one morning as a giant bug. First mounted in Kafka's home city of Prague, The Metamorphosis in VR provided its creative director Johnson a stepping stone into the world of libraries in the future.

The Infinite Library is at the Goethe-Institut/Max Mueller Bhavan, Delhi from March 23-27.

Library in a cave

Three years after VRwandlung, the new VR installation offers a curious insight into the possibilities of an alternative library run on new technologies. The Infinite Library is set as a cave, because as Johnson says, "many of our oldest relics have been found in caves". Inside the cave, a visitor will find eight cosmic pools built around a rock representing different stages of evolution. Stories of the planet are hidden in various objects in the interactive library experience.

The art installation has a main library, which is a 15-minute journey experienced by a visitor by wearing a headset and standing in a sandbox holding hand controllers. There are three separate mini-libraries, called Library of Shadows containing puppetry, Library of Elements with medieval European alchemy, and Library of Navigation showing the accumulation of knowledge using oral tradition by Polynesian navigators before compasses and sextants.

"Most of our narratives and knowledge in South and South East Asia have been in oral traditions," says Delhi-based puppet designer Anurupa Roy, who joined master puppeteer Gunduraju from Karnataka's Togalu Gombeyaata leather shadow puppetry tradition to tell the story of the churning of the ocean in The Infinite Library. "It is a very good moment in time to lead the young generation to the intangible oral heritage," adds Roy.

"Libraries can continue to be reimagined," says Johnson, who saw the neighbourhood library in Ohio, United States, where he grew up, as "a portal, a door to another world". Exploring libraries for the VR installation project, he found that the world's earliest known library in ancient Mesopotamia (now Iraq) was full of clay tablets storing knowledge. In South Africa's Blombos cave, about 300 km from Cape Town, cave etchings revealed the first artworks by human beings more than 70,000 years ago. "A library could be a cave," he adds.

"A library is a community space where you are introduced to new things. That is why I think the library is a perfect place for VR," says Safurat Balogun, head of library services at the Goethe-Institut, Delhi. "You learn something new, not necessarily by picking up a book. It can be VR today, tomorrow something else."

The idea of enchanted libraries in the future can be unsettling too. The arrival of metaverse and shoppers buying virtual properties with real money and the growing importance of Artificial Intelligence have also painted a dystopian future. "We can't create an ocean, we can only make simulations of spaces like the sea," says Johnson. "These advanced technologies won't exist if we give up our biosphere." And for those still not ready to visualise future libraries, The Infinite Library's creative director has a quote from Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, among the first to create a myth about libraries that are infinite: "I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library."