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: 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: 2 minutes The Writing Platform is looking to commission articles of approx 750 to 2,000 words on creating stories with augmented and virtual reality technologies. This might include the use of AR and VR in fiction and non-fiction literature, journalism, theatre, movies, and games as well as articles that explore AR and VR as tools to promote… Read more »
Reading Time: 4 minutes Timothy West’s satirical radio play “This gun in my right hand is loaded” is a wonderful demonstration of what happens when writers who are used to one particular medium (in this case the screen) adapt their idea for another (in this case radio) and fail to account for the affordances and limitations of the form…. Read more »
Reading Time: < 1 minute Screenshots is a regular feature by Simon Groth, highlighting a project, app, or other resource of interest. A Place Called Ormalcy by Mez Breeze Meet Mr Ormal, a happy-go-lucky law-abiding citizen of Ormalcy, a Utopian world full of contented creatures and happy citizens. Happy, happy citizens. Right from the beginning, something is off in A… Read more »
Reading Time: < 1 minute Screenshots is a regular feature by Simon Groth, highlighting a project, app, or other resource of interest. Our Cupidity Coda by Mez Breeze To read through the text of this VR poem by Mez Breeze takes only minutes, but it would be a mistake to think of this work as slight or even brief. Our… Read more »
Reading Time: 7 minutes Way back in the wilds of the year 2008, artist-extraordinaire James Morgan and I engaged in an animated discussion about Augmented and Virtual Reality. At that time James and I were collaborators-in-crime in the Third Faction Collective, a group of digital artists intent on constructing game interventions in Massively Multiplayer Online Spaces. During this discussion,… Read more »
Reading Time: 5 minutes Last year, I almost made an empathy game. It never quite progressed far enough to merit a title, but it did have a main character, some painstakingly-drawn pixel background art, and a mini-game where you could choose what to watch on TV from a list of fictional programmes with names like “Nature Squash” and “Changing… Read more »