Developing Virtual Historian: Doctrine & Covenants

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At the same time we needed to start getting additional historical content for the program.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.