Why an LDS Seminary Teacher and History Hobbyist Created Virtual Historian: Doctrine and Covenants

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.