RETURN TO THE NORTH：VIRTUAL ARCHAOLOGY OF ELECTRONIC ORBITS

<sub>Return to the North: Virtual Archaeology of Electronic Orbits is a 6DoF XR interactive narrative set in post-industrial railway cities in northern China. It examines how rail connectivity reshaped everyday visual culture amid long-term extraction and depletion. We assemble public media footage, personal archives, printed at- lases, handheld LiDAR scans, and photogrammetric captures into a traversable layered space using SfM/MVS and 3D Gaussian Splat- ting (3DGS) for real-time rendering. A provenance-preserving strategy keeps differences in era, resolution, and context perceptible as volumetric fault lines, ghosting, captions, and seams—forming what we call a Digital Volumetric Layering aesthetic. Through em- bodied drift beyond prescribed paths, viewers infer relations among fragments, tracing how economic geography and memory politics surface in the seams of reconstruction.

回归北方：电子轨迹的虚拟考古》是一款 6DOF XR交互叙事作品，背景设定在中国北部的后工业铁路城市。该作品探讨了在长期资源开采与枯竭的背景下，铁路联通性如何重塑日常视觉文化。我们通过SfM/MVS与实时渲染的3D高斯贴图技术，将公共媒体影像、私人档案、印刷地图集、手持激光雷达扫描及摄影测量数据整合为可穿行分层空间。通过溯源保留策略，不同时代、分辨率与语境的差异以体积断层线、重影、字幕及接缝等形式呈现，形成我们称之为“数字体积分层美学”的视觉体系。观众在预设路径之外进行沉浸式漂移，由此推演碎片间的关联，追溯经济地理与记忆政治如何在重建的缝隙中显现。</sub>

_{—SIGGRAPH  2025
—The 7th Fenach Animation Week}