Playing the Archive

Over at CASA, Valerio Signorelli has been developing prototypes for Augmented Reality play. Playing the Archive will bring to life the play experiences of children in the 1950s and 1960s captured in the Opie archive and make it available to visitors at the V&A Museum of Childhood and the Weston Park Museum in Sheffield. AR technologies will also inform the development of experimental play spaces in Sheffield and London.

In this video, Valerio showcases an early prototype of ‘sonic hopscotch’, which uses documents and audio recordings from the Opie Archive as well as a video recording taken as part of the Children’s Playground Games and Songs in the New Media Age project. (Note that as this is a prototype, the recordings and the game don’t yet tie together: the audio and video are for a clapping game, while the document describes a game played using cigarette cards.)