Rapid Prototyping of Immersive Video for Popularization of Historical Knowledge

Popularization of historical data implies going beyond the language and knowledge specific to this scientific field in order to make it understood. This applies to people's perception of the world since many changes have been applied to our surrounding environment. Communicating the way people used to hear, see and smell allows for a better retranscription of what once was, and a more effective connection between the teller and his audience. After the sensory data is gathered through heterography, comes the issue of assembling and presenting them. For the Bretez project, a reconstruction of eighteenth century Paris neighbourhood, the process is done manually. This paper describes a new approach to this aspect of historian's work. Using an immersive editing platform controlled through virtual reality devices, we built a pipeline dedicated to facilitating the creation process for historians, and transparently allowing for exporting the result to multiple video formats (immersive or not). The specific case of prototyping this pipeline with the Bretez project for future user experiments is described and discussed.