September 3, 2026
MIT has long been recognized around the world for pushing the boundaries of technology and exploring how innovation can have a positive impact on society. From advances in medicine to education, urban planning, and public art, MIT continues to advance how technology can change the way people understand and interact with the world around them.
That spirit of innovation extends beyond MIT's traditional scientific and engineering disciplines. Through its Open Documentary Lab, MIT has also been exploring how immersive technologies can transform the way stories are created, experienced, and shared.
The MIT Open Documentary Lab brings together artists, tech professionals, and storytellers experimenting with new forms of documentary and nonfiction storytelling. The lab launched Layers of Place: an exhibition designed to explore how augmented reality could reveal the hidden histories embedded within physical spaces. To bring that vision to life, MIT partnered with Hoverlay.
MIT Meets Hoverlay
For Layers of Place, MIT was looking for a way to connect digital storytelling with specific physical locations and partnered with Hoverlay.
Through the collaboration with Hoverlay, MIT's artists and storytellers can create digital experiences that are tied directly to physical locations. Digital artwork, historical narratives, and immersive experiences can be layered onto existing structures and environments using Hoverlay’s spatial publishing.
This collaboration gave the MIT Open Documentary Lab a platform to experiment with a central question behind Layers of Place: What if technology could allow people to discover stories that are physically invisible but still connected to the places around them?
Bringing Layers of Place to Life
The resulting Layers of Place exhibition features seven augmented reality projects developed by a diverse group of storytellers and artists, including Nadav Assor, Rashin Fahandej, Joanna Wright, Yucef Merhi, Tamara Shogaolu, Mathieu Pradat, Sahar Sajadieh, Lori Landay, Meghna Singh, Simon Wood, Lesiba Mabitsela, and Danny Goldfield.
Each project approaches the relationship between hidden stories and a place from different perspectives. Together, the installations explored stories that have often been overlooked or left out of traditional historical narratives.
Hoverlay's technology provided the connective layer between these stories and the MIT campus. Visitors can use their phones to interact with digital content anchored to the physical environment, transforming familiar locations into unknown stories.
The Fovnders Pillars
One particularly notable project is The Fovnders Pillars by Meghna Singh, Simon Wood, and Lesiba Mabitsela.
The artists sought to transform MIT’s six neoclassical pillars at Building 10 into a digital historical narrative, using Hoverlay’s scanning capabilities to digitally overlay vibrant African textile patterns onto the pillars.
The project honors the history and culture of the African diaspora while also asking MIT to confront its own history of racial and institutional injustice. By digitally covering familiar MIT buildings and structures with African textiles, the artists bring African cultural traditions and histories into a space that has traditionally centered Western academic knowledge. This contrast encourages viewers to reconsider whose histories and cultures are represented within the university and whose have been overlooked.
In this way, the project transforms the MIT campus into a space where African identity, history, and cultural expression can be seen, acknowledged, and celebrated.
Oryza: Healing Ground
Another installation was Oryza: Healing Ground by Tamara Shogaolu.
This immersive experience takes the form of a digital quilt, symbolizing the thousands of Black agricultural scientists and agricultural workers whose contributions and histories have often been overlooked. Rather than presenting the history of Black farmers and agricultural workers as a traditional documentary viewed separately from its audience, the experience uses augmented reality to place these stories directly into the viewer’s physical surroundings.
By bringing these overlooked histories into spaces where audiences may not expect to encounter them, Oryza: Healing Ground demonstrates how AR can change the way people experience and engage with history. The work shows that stories about the past do not have to remain confined to traditional forms of historical representation; they can be brought into the environments people occupy in their everyday lives.
Tribeca Film Festival and SXSW
The success and reach of the project attracted the attention of major cultural festivals, including the Tribeca Film Festival’s Immersive program and South by Southwest (SXSW). This recognition provided several of the participating artists with opportunities to bring their augmented reality experiences beyond their original setting at MIT in Boston and introduce them to new audiences in New York City and Austin.
As part of Tribeca’s Immersive program, two projects from Layers of a Place, The Fovnders Pillars and Power of the Loom, were invited to present their augmented reality installations. The artists adapted their experiences for a new environment, allowing the work to engage audiences beyond the MIT campus while demonstrating how AR can transform the way people encounter art and history in physical spaces.
The project also expanded to SXSW in Austin, Texas, where participating artists adapted their AR experiences for the Austin Central Library. Rather than being tied to the architecture and history of MIT, the works were recontextualized within a new public space and city. These invitations to Tribeca and SXSW demonstrate how the project’s experiments with augmented reality could travel across different cultural and physical environments, extending the artists’ work to audiences well beyond its original Boston setting.
The Impact of the MIT–Hoverlay Collaboration
The collaboration between MIT’s Open Documentary Lab and Hoverlay has grown into a strong partnership centered on exploring how digital technology and AR can change the way people experience familiar places.
Through Layers of Place, MIT and Hoverlay brought together artists, storytellers, and technology to experiment with new ways of connecting stories to physical environments. By using AR to add digital layers to real-world locations, the collaboration gives audiences an opportunity to look at places they may already know from a different perspective and rediscover the histories and stories embedded within them.
The project demonstrates the potential of this collaboration to create new ways for audiences to engage with history, culture, and place. Rather than simply adding digital content to a physical space, MIT and Hoverlay are exploring how technology can encourage people to see familiar environments differently, and uncover stories that might otherwise remain hidden.
To learn more about MIT’s Open Documentary Lab click here.