Déjà Vu

Déjà Vu is a product that returns users to the web page where they were just before clicking a hyperlink. It holds onto a moment when they want to think again, feel they have seen something before, or simply wish to stay a little longer. This product intervenes in the moment just before a click. It works when you want to return to yourself immediately before clicking, rather than after. Hyperlinks always point toward the future, but Déjà Vu calls up a past not yet decided.

In 1876, the French philosopher Émile Boirac used the term “déjà vu.” In 1896, the psychiatrist François-Léon Arnaud reported a case of a patient experiencing pathological déjà vu. Meanwhile, the psychologist Edward Titchener explained that when distraction splits a single perceptual experience in two, the later experience may feel like a repetition of the earlier one. Users feel they have already seen something before even seeing it, and Déjà Vu responds to that time difference.