Swiss Echoes: Touch the Map, Feel the Memories

What if every corner of Switzerland could replay the moments that shaped it?

Imagine tapping Geneva’s lakeside and watching Montreux Jazz legends ignite the night in 1969. Touch the Matterhorn to witness a daring alpine rescue unfolding through grainy footage from decades ago. Glide through Zürich streets and step seamlessly into everyday life as filmed in the 1950s.

Swiss Echoes is more than an interactive map. It’s a digital interactive installation that transforms Switzerland into a tapestry of memories, powered by cutting-edge AI.

AI Crafting Art from Archives

We took 200,000 hours of audiovisual heritage from the Swiss Television (RTS), ranging from vintage documentaries and newsreels to iconic shows, and turned them into something immersive, beautiful, and deeply human.

Behind the scenes, powerful artificial intelligence carefully unravels long video recordings:

• Speech recognition precisely pinpoints meaningful moments by identifying breaks in conversations and topics.
• Large Language Models (LLMs) then interpret these transcripts, organizing thousands of clips into coherent thematic clusters, like sports, politics, music, and daily life.
• Semantic vector search instantly connects these rich moments, creating intuitive paths of exploration rather than rigid searches.

Explore, Experience, Remember

Step into the gallery and immerse yourself in a spectacular, panoramic 3D experience projected seamlessly by a cluster of five synchronized computers running Unreal Engine. Effortlessly browse by geographic location and thematic clusters, rediscovering forgotten stories hidden within familiar places.

Instead of simply searching, you explore. Instead of watching passively, you participate. History becomes immediate, spatial, and personal.

A Cultural Experience for Everyone

Swiss Echoes provides journalists a rich historical canvas to contextualize their stories. Educators anchor lessons in local history. Communities rediscover themselves, unearthing a heritage long hidden in archival vaults.

With an innovative, secure backend hosted at EPFL, Swiss Echoes is ready to grow, seamlessly integrating collections from jazz legends to Olympic heroes.

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About this project

Swiss Echoes is part of the Sinergia research initiative, “Narratives from the Long Tail: Transforming Access to Audiovisual Archives.”

This interdisciplinary collaboration led by the Experimental Museology Lab (eM+) at EPFL establishes computational museology as both theory and practice. It bridges machine intelligence with data curation, ontology with visualization, and connects diverse communities through immersive, interactive interfaces.