Digital Sojourns
XR
Unity
Digital Humanities
Technical advisor (2023–2025) to Prof. David Del Testa’s immersive virtual study-abroad project, helping the team use Unity and XR to retrace Bashō’s Narrow Road to the Deep North.
Digital Sojourns is a project led by Prof. David Del Testa (History) to make study abroad accessible to students who can’t travel. Its first installment follows the poet Matsuo Bashō’s 1689 journey in The Narrow Road to the Deep North. It combines an augmented-reality-enhanced app, a video recreation of the route, and scans of sites in Japan inside a Unity-based environment.
From late 2023 through 2025 I served as the project’s technical advisor. I helped the team work out how to use Unity, and eventually XR, to build an immersive experience:
- advising on the platform before the summer 2024 student team began
- meeting with that team through the summer
- joining the project’s advisory group
- consulting on bringing 3D scans of sites into Unity
The project debuted its app, Tabibito (“traveler”), in December 2024.
digitalsojourns.org · Project blog
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