Category Archives: VR

Playing the Archive begins Motion Capture work

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The Playing the Archive team have been busy working on sound recording and motion capture for the interactive elements of the project. Children from schools in London, Sheffield, and Aberdeen were recorded reading out children’s descriptions of games from the Opie archive.

These descriptions will be used as part of an interactive ‘Time Telephone’ that will be displayed at the V&A Museum of Childhood and other locations around the UK. The CASA team also used motion capture equipment with the children to create a virtual avatar which will be used as part of our interactive Clapping Hero game, where users will be able to hone their clapping skills with the avatar.

New Augmented Reality prototypes in development

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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.)

 

Work with schools begins

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Kate, John and Valerio joined a staff meeting at our London project primary school. John introduced the work of the Opies, showed the teachers the Playtimes site from the previous project and gave a broad overview of the project. Kate talked about how the researchers would work with the children discussed the various play spaces in and around the school. Valerio gave a great presentation about his work, explained the difference between AR (Augmented Reality), VR (Virtual Reality) and MR (Mixed Reality), and gave the teachers a range of equipment to play with and explore. There was great enthusiasm at the school for the project and we are all looking forward to getting started!

Teacher Tom tries out a VR headset while a Times Education journalist takes pictures

Building immersive worlds

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The team is beginning work on the immersive worlds component of the project. The VR and advanced visualisation specialists at the Bartlett Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) at University College London, Valerio Signorelli and Andy Hudson-Smith, are testing out ideas for VR and AR (augmented reality) worlds. Working with the materials in the Opie Collection, they will help to bring the games and songs of the past to life. In the picture above we are testing a prototype for an augmented reality avatar.