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 »
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 »
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 »
“Alexa, open The Messlins” says one of my kids out loud to the smart speaker setup in our living room. After eight months of research, design and production, I was about to witness my children interacting with my voice-enabled audio story for the very first time. With a background in performance and media production, I… Read more »
In introducing my new novel, author Ryan O’Neill puts it most succinctly: This is an introduction to a novel you will never read. He adds hastily that he is referring not to the book in your hands, the one he hopes you’re about to begin, but the novel that inspired his words, the novel he… Read more »
Like all of us, March 2020 was a slow decline into horror at the news of Covid-19. While the British government dithered about what to do, I cancelled some events I’d been booked to hold in promotion of my novel The Blame Game. Quite frankly, I was afraid to travel (from Glasgow to various parts… Read more »
Matt Finch writes and helps communities, companies, and institutions around the world to do useful and surprising new things. His latest digital work is the interactive narrative, The Library of Last Resort. You have a varied background including a Ph.D. in Modern Intellectual History. How did you arrive at this nexus of strategy, storytelling and technology? I wrote… Read more »
Mez Breeze is one of the leading innovators in the fields of experimental storytelling and virtual reality literature. Her work has heralded new ways of making and collaborating for creators, and her ethos and politics demonstrate ethical practices for all creative practitioners. In 2019 Mez was awarded the Marjorie C. Luesebrink Career Achievement Award to honour… Read more »
When writers discuss plot and pacing in narrative craft, especially in creative writing classes, we often talk about the curve of stories, the rise and fall in tension that characterises the most common story structures. Now usually, at least in my experience, that curve is not something a writer actively thinks about while composing a… Read more »
This is an article about an augmented reality practice-based research project, The Fantasia Express, commissioned by the UK Department for Transport through an InnovateUK competition. And about how a non-writer tried to create a story around a train journey from London to Edinburgh. I am an artist who specialises in technology-driven public realm work that… Read more »