We had shopped our idea about mixing VR photographs and LDS Church History around a bit but didn’t have any takers. At the time I was a musician in the Los Angeles area and Trevor was a software consultant in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Both of us had quite a bit of experience with media technologies but we had never developed a product and brought it to market.

But “Virtual Historian”, as we came to call it, seemed like too good of an idea to not do. It wasn’t that the business idea was really good (we never expected to make any money off of it), but the product we had in our minds was something we would really like to own.

So we just got started. With a bit of financing for equipment and travel from our father we mapped out a plan to take VR photographs of every historical location associated with one of the revelations of the Doctrine & Covenants.

The plan was for Trevor to get photos of the New York, Pennsylvania and Ohio locations by himself. Then I would accompany him to get the Missouri, Illinois and Iowa shots.

At the same time we needed to start getting additional historical content for the program. We really enjoyed history but we were not historians. We ended up licensing “Who’s Who in the Doctrine & Covenants” by Susan Easton Black as well as “Revelations of the Restoration” by Joseph Fielding McConkie and Craig Ostler.

I can’t remember how we originally came in contact with Craig but he became an invaluable resource throughout the whole project. Not only did we license his book for historical background on the sections themselves, in addition he provided:

• Guidance on what locations to photograph, where to find them, what parts were important to capture, etc.
• Historical backgrounds to include in the application for all of the locations.

The project was also going to need a lot of graphics. Most importantly we were going to need interactive maps that would tie all the locations together. Clark Hess began working on putting together the maps (which are quite stunning in my opinion) and other graphics.

There were a lot of lose ends and unknowns as we started the project off but each time we encountered a roadblock we found a way around it. We had technology that didn’t work quite as planned (Trevor ended up having to reshoot all of the photographs for New York because of a problem with the camera setup), corrupted databases, delays in obtaining licensing and the daunting task of learning everything you need to know about shipping a physical product for the first time.

The whole process took much longer than we anticipated. But finally in 2003 we were able to release Virtual Historian: Doctrine & Covenants. It met with critical acclaim if not commercial success. The most exciting part of the entire experience was actually getting the product in front of people. But that is a story for another post.

Back in 1998 my brother Trevor DeVore was teaching LDS Seminary in Ann Arbor Michigan. The topic for the year was Doctrine & Covenants. Trevor is a classic technology geek. He has always loved playing with any new technology he could get his hands on.

In 1998 his latest hobby was Virtual Reality (VR) photography. VR photography involves taking multiple photos from a single location and then “stitching” them together into something like you see blow.

This is a photo of the Translation Room in the Newel K. Whitney Store. If you click and drag on the photo you can see that you can turn around 360 degrees.

Trevor wanted to give his students a better appreciation for some of the LDS Church historical sites so he decided to take from VR photos of the sites in Kirtland, Ohio.

After many hours of working with the photos he sent me a few examples. They were fantastic. I had been to Kirtland but I knew a lot of people who hadn’t.

I love history. I love visiting historical locations and love teaching people about history. I told Trevor that he needed to find a way to get these out to people.

Then we had an idea. We realized the goal of taking these photos wasn’t just to share pictures. It was to help people better understand and appreciate LDS Church history. The photos alone wouldn’t do that.

At the time, digital scripture resources were very popular. But they were very “text heavy”. The publishers really hadn’t done more than digitize a bunch of text and make it searchable. Despite all of the advances in media technology, history was still being taught with written text. We thought we could do better than that.

We began to imagine what you would want to have right at hand to really dig into the history of the Doctrine & Covenants:

• The Scriptures
• Historical background on the sections
• A map to get a sense of where events occurred
• A timeline
• Biographies of the people involved in the revelations
• And, of course, some of the VR photographs

We thought this would be a perfect “next step” for some of these digital scripture products so we pitched the idea to a couple of companies. They liked the idea but didn’t think it was financially viable.

So we had three choices:

1. Scrap the project
2. Make a quick and cheap project that just contained the VR photographs
3. Get into a project that we didn’t really know how to do and didn’t have the money to complete

I’ll bet you can guess what we chose. In our next post I will tell you how Virtual Historian actually came to fruition.

Welcome to the new Virtual Historian blog. On this blog we want to accomplish a few things:

1. Give a little more background on what Virtual Historian: Doctrine & Covenants is and why we created it.
2. Post additional Virtual Reality (VR) photos of other LDS church historical sites that we have taken over the years.

We hope that you subscribe to the blog and that you enjoy the articles we post here.