January Future Landscapes Workshop: Enhancing Seen and Unseen Landscapes with Mixed Reality

NUI Galway and Galway 2020 are offering an exciting opportunity to get involved with the Galway 2020 digital programme through the ground-breaking initiative – Future Landscapes.

Future Landscapes is an intensive four-week programme created in a collaboration between the Moore Institute at NUI Galway and Galway 2020, as part of the Galway 2020 digital programme. Run by Rachel Uwa of the internationally-renowned ‘School of Machines, Making and Make-believe’ based in Berlin, the programme will focus on enhancing physical and social landscapes through technology and exploring the potentials of Mixed Reality (MR).

Taking place in May 2019, the programme is aimed at anyone involved in creative projects (such as architects, designers, makers, artists, musicians, performers), and researchers and students from Arts and Humanities at NUI Galway. Applications for the programme, as well as for a limited number of fee-waiver bursaries, will close on Wednesday, 28 February 2019. A technical background is not required to participate.

Mixed Reality is the mix of real and virtual worlds where physical and digital objects co-exist and interact in real time. MR comes with various powerful features such as mapping physical surroundings, monitoring gestures, and language processing for voice recognition and more. Mixed reality directs a new way of working by offering ‘real-world, real-life’ experiences. Pokemon Go used these techniques to capture the public interest and brought MR into the mainstream. Creative uses of these technologies might involve augmenting Galway’s landscape to show a historical or literary perspective, or exploring Galway’s various social landscapes in creative ways.

While various types of augmented and virtual reality systems have existed for some time, recent advances in mobile technology platforms provide us with more powerful ways of creating and sharing these experiences with a wider audience. In this workshop, participants will consider ways of enhancing both the landscapes that we can see around us, as well as those that are unseen, such as political or economic landscapes.

Much experimentation is yet to be done by utilising the other capabilities of handheld devices to stream live data, communicate with others, and incorporate information from built-in sensors, and some of these will be explored throughout the programme. 

David Kelly, Digital Humanities Manager at the Moore Institute for Research in Humanities and Social Studies, NUI Galway, said: “The programme is an exciting collaboration between the arts and humanities research community and the creative and technical communities. This project will help participants to develop skills to allow them to communicate their research in new and exciting ways. Mixed Reality is an emerging area that has lots of potential, which hasn’t been explored to its full extent yet. It’s important when we’re thinking about capacity building as a part of Galway 2020 and that the University’s community has the opportunity to be a part of it.”

Marilyn Reddan, Head of Programme at Galway 2020, said: “Galway 2020 is delighted to be announcing this collaboration with the Moore Institute at NUI Galway and School of Machines in Berlin. Our programme is built on an exciting collaboration and partnership. We’re looking forward to this project, which will explore how Mixed Reality with the blend of Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality changes the way users create, connect, and collaborate with a new holographic experience.”

The project has been co-funded by Galway 2020 and by NUI Galway’s Higher Education Authority (HEA) project on Digital Literacy in Irish Humanities.

For further information and application details, visit:  http://mooreinstitute.ie/event/future-landscapes/