Chapter 5 · 5 of 9

A research session, end to end

From an empty project to a documented conservation plugin. The figures below show what happens inside the guest at each step; the surrounding workbench is described alongside.

A researcher works entirely in the browser. The walkthrough below follows the path from creating a project to producing the deliverable, the way the web3d / VRML conservation work was actually done.

Note on figures rvmc’s own web interface is in active development and not yet captured here; the screenshots show the guests and tools a session drives. A full interface walkthrough will follow.

Create a project

In practice a project is one artwork. It is a private realm: its own version-controlled workspace (tools, notes, data), its own access group, and a code editor pre-seeded with a plugin skeleton. Students or collaborators are scoped to their own project and nothing else.

Pick a golden base and clone it

Choose a verified base — a sealed, ready-made master copy of a period system, called a golden image (the next chapter explains these) — say “let’s try Windows XP” — and the system makes an instant clone: a copy created in seconds that stores only what you change. Your VM boots in seconds, isolated on its own network.

Figure 1. A verified golden base booted clean — here Windows 10 at full resolution with working drivers, one of several period bases you can clone from.

Drive the machine in your browser

The VM’s screen appears live in a browser tab. You operate the old system directly — no remote desktop software inside the guest, no local install.

Bring the work up — install period runtimes

Most early-2000s works need a period plugin. The workbench keeps a catalogue of era-correct runtimes (Flash, Java, QuickTime, Shockwave, 3D players) with their provenance, and can install them — on Windows, even by clicking through an installer’s dialogs automatically.

Figure 2. Installing the period Cosmo Player 3D plugin inside Windows XP during the VRML conservation work — a dependency the artwork cannot run without.

Watch the network

Each VM sits on an isolated network you can observe three ways: passive packet capture, an intercepting proxy that can decrypt HTTPS (via a certificate trusted inside the guest) and replay pages from a web archive, and stand-in services for servers that are gone. Answering what a dead server once served is a separate, shared piece: wayback-mcp, a small service over the Internet Archive (four read-only tools, speaking the Model Context Protocol — an open standard that lets AI assistants call tools) the analyst queries to find the right archived snapshots — distinct from the guest-side wayback-cache-proxy that then replays them back into the running VM.

Tracing a work's live network requests — the kind of forensic observation that reveals which dead services a piece depends on. — Figure 3. Tracing a work’s live network requests — the kind of forensic observation that reveals which dead services a piece depends on.

Put the AI assistant to work — inside the guest

An AI assistant works inside the running machine over a host-only channel: reading files, running commands, reading the registry, installing software, and watching the network. The same tool library feeds both the chat and the AI built into the code editor; the model is reached by a swappable alias.

Beyond calling tools one at a time, rvmc has its own analyst agent — a bounded revival loop (read the autopsy report, boot the era machine, launch the work, verify it runs, snapshot a known-good state) that is itself exposed as a tool, so the chat or your own agent can hand it a whole job. Under the hood the AI stack is pydantic-ai over the LiteLLM gateway; it drives on request and never resets a machine on its own.

rvmc's in-guest agent present on a Mac OS 9 system — the assistant can act from inside even a 2001-era machine, over a channel the artwork can never reach. — Figure 4. rvmc’s in-guest agent present on a Mac OS 9 system — the assistant can act from inside even a 2001-era machine, over a channel the artwork can never reach.

Snapshot before you experiment

Take a snapshot — a frozen, restorable copy of the machine’s exact state — before trying anything risky. Reverting is always a deliberate act — nothing resets on its own. Your workspace files are versioned separately with git (the standard version-control system), so code and machine state are independent axes.

Author the conservation plugin — the deliverable

The output is not a fragile one-off VM but a small, self-describing plugin that records how to revive and preserve the work: the base to clone, the steps to run, the dependencies to mediate. A real example ships in the project: a plugin that brings a 1990s VRML world back to life in Internet Explorer 6. The plugin is what you hand on, archive, or promote toward exhibition.