Conversing with the Past: Immersive Access to Cultural Digital Archives with LLMs and Spatial Interfaces

Abstract

Historical digitized archives, such as newspapers, preserve cultural memory but remain difficult to explore due to noisy OCR and rigid keyword-based search interfaces. We present a research demo that combines retrieval augmented generation with an immersive mixed reality interface on Apple Vision Pro, where interaction is driven entirely by voice and hand gestures. The system integrates LLM-based OCR refinement with a RAG pipeline over historical periodicals, enabling natural language queries, spatial browsing of results, and inspection of supporting evidence through timeline and geospatial visualizations. An empirical evaluation analyzes retrieval quality and system latency, illustrating how evidence-grounded information retrieval supports sensemaking in large archival collections. A video of the demo is provided here: https://youtu.be/WeGhnDTTJLY