Reading Time: 10 minutes We are two academics who met in Cape Town when our children became friends. Conversations around our shared interests in history, technology and Cape Town’s District Six got us speculating about social justice pedagogies in our respective disciplines. Our preliminary discussions revealed many parallels in our approaches but also intriguing distinctions, enough to seed a… Read more »
Reading Time: 9 minutes In the current participatory media culture, the development of digital media ecologies has inevitably changed how people experience their surroundings. Digital devices have become extensions of the human body, working as a medium to perceive and replicate reality (Yoh, 2001). Jaron Lanier coined the term “virtual reality” and pioneered its early development. Now, people can… Read more »
Reading Time: 11 minutes In September 2019, five months before the pandemic, I moved to Toronto to begin a PhD at York University. I had been to the city before, and as I was a new international student I thought I would make new social connections in school. However, in February 2020 the world transformed into its virtual ‘metaverse’… Read more »
Reading Time: 2 minutes The Writing Platform is commissioning articles of approx 750 to 2,000 words on all aspects of storytelling through new forms of narrative delivery and audience interaction in immersive media. We want to understand the role of emerging technologies in developing new forms of experiential storytelling and audience engagement, from digital fiction, audio and performance through… Read more »
Reading Time: 8 minutes Children’s literature has always been a genre curious to experiment and play with media. Just think of pop-up-books and how the Alice in Wonderland adaptation Alice for the iPad (2010) by Atomic Antelope was one of the first apps to explore the features of the iPad. Since the introduction of the iPad in 2010, several… Read more »
Reading Time: 8 minutes Live theatre performance in XR (extended reality), which includes both Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR), is a rapidly growing field of digital drama that sits at the convergence of immersive theatre and interactive games design. While a number of theatre companies have adapted their existing work for VR, (notably the Royal Shakespeare Company… Read more »
Reading Time: 13 minutes Weronika Lewandowska and Agnieszka Przybyszewska in conversation: on creating poetry in VR “You are not supposed to call it a subject, but an avatar. There’s no reality being portrayed, no setting, but a simulation!” That is what Polish poets from the Rozdzielczość Chleba group, experimenting with new technologies, proclaimed. Imagine, then, that instead of reading… Read more »
Reading Time: 5 minutes Have you ever felt your skin prick up as you walked into a foreign environment? Throughout my life there have been times where I’ve entered an unknown venue, be it when exploring the world as a solo traveller, or starting a new job. The mixture of excitement and anxiety that I’ve associated with an entry… Read more »
Reading Time: 8 minutes Dear metaverse diary, as I sit down to pour out my thoughts and try to find the exact place within my intricate mind that stores all my experiences related to live acting in virtual reality (VR), and, more specifically, my combined role as a VR actor, stage director and scholar within the XR theatre collective… Read more »