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Credits for the reading room on the way in
The first time each visit that you head into the record, you stand for ten seconds at a desk in the Main Reading Room of the Library of Congress as a bound volume of the record opens. The walls and the dome are two public-domain photographs of the real room, laid over a model built to its published size. The desks, lamps, chairs, carpet and the volume are drawn for the scene; its pages are set in the record’s standing forms, with no names and no dates. Any key, click or tap skips it, and with Motion off it is one still picture.
The room: the alcoves, screens, piers, arches, windows and figures: Main Reading Room. View from above showing researcher desks. Library of Congress Thomas Jefferson Building, Washington, D.C., Carol M. Highsmith (2007), Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.Public domain: the item is marked "No known restrictions on publication", and the Library's rights statement for the Highsmith Archive says Ms. Highsmith has stipulated that her photographs are in the public domain. The building's sculpture and painting (1890s) are themselves long in the public domain. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, photograph by Carol M. Highsmith [LC-DIG-highsm-03187]. Changed here: cropped to the walls (the floor and the desks below are left out: the scene builds its own), reduced to 3,072 and 1,536 pixels wide for the crossing, and kept at the crop's own 5,550 pixels for the room to sit in; measured against the room's dimensions and cast back onto the room's geometry from where it was taken; the eight statues, their pedestals and the entablature over each pier are placed where the photograph shows them, and each pier takes the photograph of one pier seen from in front.
The dome: its coffers, the painted collar and the lantern: Main Reading Room. Interior of dome. Library of Congress Thomas Jefferson Building, Washington, D.C., Carol M. Highsmith (2007), Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division; the collar and lantern paintings by Edwin Howland Blashfield (1890s).Public domain (as above: "No known restrictions on publication"; the Highsmith Archive's rights statement). Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, photograph by Carol M. Highsmith [LC-DIG-highsm-02067]. Changed here: its colours matched to the photograph of the room where both show the same coffers (a gain on each colour), reduced to 2,560 and 1,280 pixels wide for the crossing and to 6,144 for the room to sit in; cast back onto the dome's half sphere from where it was taken.
The room's dimensions and its furniture's arrangement: Handbook of the New Library of Congress (1897), Herbert Small, with essays by Charles Caffin and others, as Project Gutenberg eBook 59821.Public domain in the United States (published 1897); facts only were taken: an octagon one hundred feet across, the dome a half circle one hundred feet wide, 125 feet to its top and 160 to the lantern's crown, piers 44 feet high, 320 coffers in eight rows, the reading desks of dark mahogany in rings round the central desk with aisles between.
The desks, chairs and central desk: the mahogany: Dark Wood, Dimitrios Savva (photography), Dario Barresi (baking), Rico Cilliers (tiling), Poly Haven.CC0 1.0. Changed here: the colour map kept at 1,024 pixels, the normal and roughness maps reduced to 512; the wear on the desks' tops (dulled patches, scratches, a ring or two) is drawn here over the roughness.
The volume's leather binding: Brown Leather, Rob Tuytel (Poly Haven).CC0 1.0. Changed here: tinted oxblood; the title and the rules in gold are drawn on it here.
The carpet's weave: Carpet015, ambientCG (Lennart Demes).CC0 1.0.
The volume's pages: Pages set here in the manner of the Congressional Record, The Civic Archive.Drawn for the scene; the text is the standing forms of the House's daily proceedings (the Journal, the Pledge of Allegiance, messages, referrals), without names, dates or a real day's business.
The sound of the room: Made on your device, The Civic Archive.Nothing is recorded or fetched: the hush of a great stone room (filtered noise through a reverberation shaped for the room's size), a footstep far off and its echo, a page turned, a chair, the faint hum of the lamp at your desk, and your own steps, are each a few oscillators and bursts of noise shaped as they play. Off until you turn it on.
Drawing it: three.js r169, the three.js authors.MIT licence.
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