Immersive Culture and International Heritage
Focus of our research
The CPC examines how extended reality technologies (AR/VR/360) offer new immersive ways of presenting and preserving cultural archives, collections, objects and artefacts. Incorporating methods from computing (e.g. AI and machine learning) into the humanities, we explore how new postdigital media technologies can help us to interpret cultural heritage while democratising the creative industries. Our work contributes to the development of interactive archives and multimedia museum exhibits that can help cultural institutions manage their collections while enabling publics to creatively engage with their cultural heritage - but also challenge dominant narratives through their remixing of personal stories and archives.
Our investigation into immersive culture includes playful and gameful design practices for creating engaging, contextualised, and meaningful experiences on various mediums. Games and gameplay are increasingly, if not fully, embedded in our everyday lives. The wide reach of games in all their varieties does not discriminate, opening up opportunities for their design aspects to be embedded into mediums for communicating serious messages, affecting emotions in engaging stories and environments, and changing attitudes and behaviours in the process.
Key Researchers
- Professor Jacqueline Cawston
- Professor Sylvester Arnab
- Dr Kevin Walker
- Dr Michael Loizou
- Dr Andrew Yip
- Dr Sarah Merry
- Dr Petros Lameras
- Dr Bianca Wright
- Holly Turpin
Image credit: Dr Jacqueline Cawston, Shakespeare XR. Photo courtesy of AiSolve.
