Thousands of pages of court exhibits from high-profile corporate trials often end up buried in dense, hard-to-navigate legal archives. A new interactive web project takes a radically different approach to public court documents, transforming trial evidence into a functional digital time capsule.
Bo Lau, an engineer at document processing company Extend, has built an interactive web simulation that recreates the desk of Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes. The project lets visitors navigate a meticulously staged 2016-era workstation populated entirely by genuine emails, text messages, presentation slides, and internal records made public during the United States v. Elizabeth Holmes criminal trial.
A Meticulous Return to 2016
The simulation drops users directly into Holmes' office environment during the final period before the blood-testing startup collapsed under scrutiny. The attention to historical and technological detail is central to the experience.
Visitors can interact with several pieces of hardware from that era:
- An iPhone that requires the classic slide-to-unlock gesture and still features a physical home button.
- A MacBook Air running OS X El Capitan, complete with desktop folders, open applications, and communication threads.
- A digital rendering of the Theranos Edison machine, the proprietary blood-testing device that sat at the core of the company's fraudulent claims.
Rather than reading through dry, sequential PDF filings on legal databases, users can scroll through text message threads and click through company presentations directly within the simulated devices. Lau noted in an announcement that the texts, emails, slides, internal documents, and Theranos machine records are all real materials sourced directly from official exhibits in the federal criminal trial.
Visitors can even interact with the Edison machine simulation, which Theranos famously claimed could run dozens of medical tests using just a single drop of blood. In reality, the company relied largely on modified commercial analyzers while concealing technical failures from regulators and partners.
Turning Trial Exhibits into an Interactive Archive
Federal court discovery rules frequently make thousands of internal corporate communications accessible to the public, but the volume of records can make casual exploration nearly impossible. Sifting through trial databases typically requires downloading massive, poorly indexed PDF collections that lack narrative context.
Lau's project provides an intuitive graphical interface for that legal archive. By placing documents back onto the simulated screens where they originally lived, the website gives the public an unusually immersive look into internal deliberations, executive conversations, and investor pitches. The familiar layout of email inboxes and messaging apps makes the evidence far easier to browse and comprehend than conventional court filings.
The Strategy Behind the Simulator
While the project offers plenty of entertainment value for followers of Silicon Valley history, it also serves a dual promotional purpose.
Lau is using the site to highlight an upcoming watch party organized by Extend for "You Can See Everything," an Elizabeth Holmes documentary from Nathan Fielder that recently debuted at the Telluride Film Festival.
At the same time, the interactive project acts as a creative showcase for Extend itself. The company develops software designed to parse, extract, and split complex business documents. By handling, structuring, and presenting an enormous volume of unstructured legal records within an interactive browser environment, the project effectively serves as a practical demonstration of modern document processing capabilities.
What It Shows About Digital Storytelling
The Theranos desk simulation highlights a growing trend in digital media: using interactive, software-based interfaces to convey historical and investigative material.
Rather than relying solely on traditional podcasts, books, or linear documentaries, developers and researchers are increasingly using interactive web development to let audiences explore real-world evidence firsthand. By recreating the software environment of the mid-2010s down to the operating system, the project demonstrates how technical skill can turn mountains of legal paperwork into accessible public history.
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