Welcome to Research Frontiers, a podcast series that highlights how our groundbreaking research informs teaching on the 150+ postgraduate programmes available at the University of Bristol.
How can technology enhance all kinds of performance? For the last episode of the series, host Ruby Lott-Lavigna is joined by Dr Paul Clarke, a Senior Lecturer in Performance Studies at the University of Bristol. Together they discuss what augmented reality has to offer the world from a performance perspective, the benefits this could have on the development of societies, and the possibilities these new technologies can unlock for the future.
Find out more about our new MA Immersive Arts (Virtual and Augmented Reality) programme
Image Credit: Adobe Stock / stokkete
Transcript:
00:00:00 Ruby Lott-Lavigna
From the University of Bristol, you are listening to research frontiers.
00:00:09 Ruby Lott-Lavigna
Hello and welcome to Research Frontiers, a podcast series from the University of Bristol. I’m your host, Ruby Lavigna, and throughout this series I’ll be joined by a collection of Bristol Sport leaders taking a deep dive into the research at the university, which is changing the world and enriching the education of students who study.
00:00:25 Ruby Lott-Lavigna
Our contributors will include some of the university’s most inspiring minds and the students who learn from them throughout these conversations will uncover the transformative power of research both in our society and in solving global challenges, as well as in the future education of students.
00:00:43 Ruby Lott-Lavigna
In this episode, we’ll be shifting the promises of our day-to-day lives, and all it will take is one podcast, virtual and augmented. Reality is the method, and we are joined by the perfect guys, Doctor Paul Clarke.
00:01:03 Ruby Lott-Lavigna
Welcome.
00:01:04 Dr Paul Clarke
Hi. Yeah. Thanks for having me.
00:01:05 Ruby Lott-Lavigna
Great to have you on. We like to begin by asking a bit about your areas of research and projects you’ve been involved with. Let’s start with the future places toolkit. Could you give us some background on what led to its development?
00:01:16 Dr Paul Clarke
Feature Places Toolkit is an augmented reality engagement activity for planning, consultation, neighbourhood visioning and participatory architectural design. But I think in order to introduce it.
00:01:29 Dr Paul Clarke
Probably need to go back to a performance called Millennium, which I made with the theatre company that I direct called uninvited guests, and we made Millennium, which is an augmented reality performance for the layered realities platform, to explain what that was, how the layered realities platform was.
00:01:49 Dr Paul Clarke
The a 5G platform that was curated by watershed and the Pervasive Media Studio watershed and the Smart Internet lab, and the idea was to make creative artworks that would demonstrate the potential and possibilities of 5G technologies for that.
00:02:10 Dr Paul Clarke
We made an augmented reality performance called Millennium and Millennium is a guided tour of the future of your.
00:02:19 Dr Paul Clarke
Place so in Millennium you get taken to a couple of different locations of science fiction stories, and those are science fiction stories that are site specific are are written specifically for the place.
00:02:33 Dr Paul Clarke
And one of them.
00:02:34 Dr Paul Clarke
Is a very utopian future, as the solar punk future of your place.
00:02:36
That’s.
00:02:39 Dr Paul Clarke
And the other is a dystopian.
00:02:41 Dr Paul Clarke
There are kind of drowned worlds, and in each of those locations your guide describes the the science fiction story, and as your guide is describing the future, you see drawings, animated drawings of that future in augmented reality appear around you when they hear the science fiction story.
00:03:02 Dr Paul Clarke
They’re able to look around for the future that we’ve imagined and see it appear so they see the the science fiction.
00:03:09 Dr Paul Clarke
Future appear layered on to the contemporary buildings using augmented reality, and at the end of Millennium you get taken to a third location and in that location we invite you to imagine your own future for the place. And as the group that are on the tour start to.
00:03:29 Dr Paul Clarke
Describe this place start to kind.
00:03:31 Dr Paul Clarke
Of build a world.
00:03:32 Dr Paul Clarke
Together, we asked them to look through their mobile devices, their devices that allow them to see into the future, and they see that the future that they’re describing is being drawn around them. So it’s appearing in augmented reality around them and they get to explore this future in this augmented reality scene that’s layered on to.
00:03:53 Dr Paul Clarke
The contemporary place they also get to hear the future that they’ve imagined. So there’s an artist who’s listening in remotely and drawing in augmented reality what the group described. But there’s also a sound designer.
00:04:07 Dr Paul Clarke
And the sound designer is able to imagine the location sound of this future world, this future place, and tries to conjure that up using sound effects and support peoples. Imagining that’s Millennium. We showed that first, as I said at the layered realities platform here in Bristol in Millennium Square, appropriately.
00:04:27 Dr Paul Clarke
Then we took that performance onto an art and technology festival in Eindhoven called Stripe, and in each of those places.
00:04:36 Dr Paul Clarke
People told us you should really think about how you could apply this in a civic context. This would be a really great tool to engage people with planning, consultation and to engage people with neighbourhood visioning. So that’s where future places toolkit came from.
00:04:52 Ruby Lott-Lavigna
That’s an interesting I mean the the toolkit looks like you could answer questions and solve a lot of problems in urban planning really efficiently. Is there anything else like it being used in in urban planning?
00:05:03 Dr Paul Clarke
So yeah, there’s there are some examples of people using augmented reality in architectural design.
00:05:10 Dr Paul Clarke
And there’s a couple of examples out there of apps that allow you to see architectural drawings in situ, but there aren’t examples out there that allow you to see plans drawn live. Yeah, I would say.
00:05:25 Dr Paul Clarke
The the function if.
00:05:26 Dr Paul Clarke
You suppose to talk. It is about engaging a range of stakeholders in planning.
00:05:30 Dr Paul Clarke
Consultation in thinking about imagining preferred features, improvements for their neighbourhood.
00:05:37 Ruby Lott-Lavigna
Let’s go back to your kind of beginning. How did you find yourself working in augmenting and virtual reality and what was your path into it?
00:05:45 Ruby Lott-Lavigna
All well on.
00:05:46 Dr Paul Clarke
The performance maker and the theatre lecturer.
00:05:49 Dr Paul Clarke
So it might seem surprising for me to be talking about augmented reality and virtual reality, but for about the last 20 years, well, in fact, over 20 years, the theater company that I’ve worked with have been exploring the intersection between performance and technologies and ways of integrating technologies into the perform.
00:06:10 Dr Paul Clarke
In particular, over the last few years, we’ve become interested in the ways in which technologies can facilitate participation in performance and the Co creation of performance with audience. We’re also residents of the Pervasive Media studio at Watershed.
00:06:29 Dr Paul Clarke
So over a period of time, we’ve become more and more interested in creative technologies.
00:06:35 Dr Paul Clarke
And in ways that we can use creative technologies in performances, ways that we can augment performance and Millennium is the first time that I’ve used augmented reality in performance. But prior to working on Millennium, I’ve worked quite a lot with spatialized sound with augmented.
00:06:55 Ruby Lott-Lavigna
Audio what’s the one that?
00:06:56
What?
00:06:56 Dr Paul Clarke
Called so before working on Villeneuve and working with visual augmented reality, I worked with uninvited guests on an organ inted audio project, which was actually a A heritage.
00:07:09 Dr Paul Clarke
And that was project called the Lost Palace, which was made for historic royal palaces and that started at at Banqueting House and took place on the the streets of Whitehall. So instead of taking you into the future, this is a project that took you into the past. This was a guided tour and interactive audio tour.
00:07:29 Dr Paul Clarke
That explored the past of Whitehall and that used augmented audio. So the idea with that tool was that you would hear history where it happened and you would be in.
00:07:40 Dr Paul Clarke
1st in historical scenes, significant events right in the very place where they happened on the contemporary streets of of Whitehall, the challenge was how do you offer people a guided tour of a palace that no longer exists, that burnt down in 1698. So with that tour, you were given a device.
00:08:01 Dr Paul Clarke
That was simply a carved piece of.
00:08:04 Dr Paul Clarke
Would with a burnt end on it and we talked about that as a historical surveillance device and we put up a number of architectural features from the Palace of Whitehall that burnt down in 1698. And when you touched the blackened end of your device to these blackened architectural features, it would trigger.
00:08:25 Dr Paul Clarke
Audio and you would be dropped into a historic scene and you might find yourself in a role you might find yourself, for instance.
00:08:33 Dr Paul Clarke
There as a witness to the secret marriage of Henry the eighth, and Anne Berlin. Or you might find yourself at the first performance of King Lear in court. Or you might you’ll find yourself with Henry the eighth at his **** fighting pit, experiencing a cock fight.
00:08:52 Dr Paul Clarke
Happening around.
00:08:54 Dr Paul Clarke
And it was all recorded in binaural audio, which is 3D spatial audio. At other points it would act as a historical surveillance device. So for instance, people would stand pointing their surveillance device towards the wall of the.
00:09:10 Dr Paul Clarke
Ministry of Defence.
00:09:11 Dr Paul Clarke
And as they move their device around, they would TuneIn to different moments in history.
00:09:17 Dr Paul Clarke
That had happened in the the palace that once stood on the same site where the Ministry of Defence is today, and we were also interested in conjuring up the acoustics of the spaces. The buildings that once stood there, that burnt down. So we tried, wherever possible to record in spaces that would have resembled the spaces that that stood there.
00:09:37 Dr Paul Clarke
So for instance, we recorded in the Great Hall at Hampton Court at night when there were no tourists around, which allowed us to record in the space that would have had a very similar acoustic to the the Great Hall at the Palace of Whitehall.
00:10:01 Ruby Lott-Lavigna
How would you say the University of Bristol has played into your work? What do you find at Bristol that you might not?
00:10:06 Dr Paul Clarke
Find elsewhere. So the thing I find exciting about working at Bristol is the potential for interdisciplinary collaboration.
00:10:15 Dr Paul Clarke
So the immersive arts course, the MA in immersive arts that I’m the program director of has been designed in collaboration with key cater in engineering and it will be taught along.
00:10:29 Dr Paul Clarke
Client the MSC in Immersive Technologies, virtual and augmented reality, and that’s exciting to have been able to design a new program collaboratively with colleagues in engineering, in computer science and will bring together students who have a computer science.
00:10:49 Dr Paul Clarke
Backgrounds who have a a creative technology background or a computing background, and students coming from a a creative arts background who, for instance, might be interested in translating their expertise in filmmaking or in theater making or in creative.
00:11:06 Dr Paul Clarke
Writing into engaging, immersive content for immersive arts, for immersive experiences and the immersive industry, so it’s so it’s partly the opportunity to teach in interdisciplinary context, but it’s also the opportunity to research in into this denary ways. So at the moment I’m working on.
00:11:26 Dr Paul Clarke
A couple of cross faculty research projects. One of those is called connecting through culture as we age.
00:11:34 Dr Paul Clarke
Which is working with a colleague in Manchester who’s in education and also with key cater in engineering, other colleagues in engineering. So that project will lead to bringing together older people and creative technologists to Co design cultural experiences.
00:11:53 Dr Paul Clarke
That connect people that combat social isolation, cultural experiences that that older people.
00:12:00 Dr Paul Clarke
Once, hopefully that will engage older audiences, who tend not to be thought of so much by those developing digital technologies. I’m also involved in the new Center for Socio Digital features, which is a also a cross faculty project that brings researchers together from across a wide range of.
00:12:20 Dr Paul Clarke
Faculties to thinking interdisciplinary.
00:12:23 Dr Paul Clarke
Ways about how we might build peoples anticipatory capacity and how we might do participatory thinking about futures, which relates very closely of course to future places talking.
00:12:36 Ruby Lott-Lavigna
OK, so let’s take things back a little bit. Now. You mentioned before uninvited guests, it looks like a very creative and playful group.
00:12:45 Ruby Lott-Lavigna
How does it serve as a foundation of what you’re currently doing?
00:12:48 Dr Paul Clarke
So uninvited guest is a theatre company. We’re a theater company of three people, myself, Jessica Hoffman and Richard Dusty. And we’ve actually been making work together since 1998. So for over 20 years now, and I’m an academic who researches.
00:13:07 Dr Paul Clarke
Largely through practice. So the research I do tends to be through performance. I tend to think through performance and ask questions that I then explore through performance.
00:13:19 Dr Paul Clarke
So I produce what’s called practice as research projects and the outputs are are performances which get shown publicly and most of my practice as research is conducted collaboratively with the company’s uninvited guests.
00:13:34 Ruby Lott-Lavigna
- So it’s a big part of your kind of research work and how you’ve come to to lock these projects?
00:13:39 Dr Paul Clarke
Yes, I would say almost all of my research projects are carried out in collaboration with uninvited guests, so they tend to be devised collaboratively with the other members of that company and others who we invite in to work with us, like creative tech.
00:13:56 Dr Paul Clarke
We’re just most recently on future spaces toolkit. We’ve been working with creative technologists called Luca Biada and Michela Panago, ASI to Italian creative technologists who go under the name of Fanizzi, and we’re now working with a Bristol based AR and VR company.
00:14:16 Dr Paul Clarke
Called Zuber. So yes, I work professionally with uninvited guests. My research takes place generally with uninvited guests.
00:14:25 Dr Paul Clarke
I’m usually producing practice as research that leads to performance outputs, but they get shown publicly around the UK. We tend to tour, work around the UK and show work also internationally, including in festivals, and I’m really interested in partnership working, so a lot of my research happens in partnership with.
00:14:45 Dr Paul Clarke
Creative industries and cultural industry.
00:14:48 Dr Paul Clarke
Worries whether those are creative technologists or heritage organizations. I’m interested in working in partnership with Creative Industries.
00:14:57 Ruby Lott-Lavigna
Are you imagining a new wave of development to come from a course such as this? What does innovation in the area of augmented and virtual reality look like?
00:15:05 Dr Paul Clarke
Well, we’re certainly hoping that this course that the immersive arts course and also the immersive technologies course is is going to lead to to new innovators who are going to come up with ways of applying immersive technologies that we we can’t yet imagine. We certainly hope that people might go on to develop new immersive products or services.
00:15:26 Dr Paul Clarke
Or that people might form companies out of the course.
00:15:30 Dr Paul Clarke
But yeah, what?
00:15:30 Dr Paul Clarke
We’re finding is that immersive technologies are being applied across a whole range of sectors, so they’re being applied within games. They’re being applied in the context of filmmaking. They’re being applied in the context of of theatre. Recently, for instance, we.
00:15:46 Dr Paul Clarke
We saw the RSC make a version of dream that used motion capture and used VR to deliver a version of Midsummer Night’s Dream to stream that into your homes. So we’re seeing VR apply.
00:15:59 Dr Paul Clarke
But in in theater. But we’re also seeing they are and they are applied for instance in simulation, we’re seeing it applied in health and and well-being I’m exploring applying AR in the context of of architecture and planning. So there’s a whole range of sectors in which these new technologies immersive.
00:16:20 Dr Paul Clarke
Technologies are are being applied and we’re hoping that graduates from these programs will go into a range of these these different sectors and apply their expertise in in a number of of quite different context.
00:16:34 Ruby Lott-Lavigna
And to tie the MBA program in with your own studies, what are you expecting to see in the future? What’s kind of on the horizon for immersive arts and the kind of things you work on? And can you predict what’s coming?
00:16:47 Dr Paul Clarke
I suppose we’ve all heard about the metaverse, haven’t we? Which makes me think about, somewhat recently, who was wearing AT shirt. That said, on it better verse, which I think is what we should probably hope for and and I think that for me it’s really important to to intervene so.
00:16:50 Ruby Lott-Lavigna
Ohh God.
00:17:04 Dr Paul Clarke
So we’re hearing a lot from big corporations like Facebook about immersive technologies, and I suppose for me, I’m I’m really interested in the kinds of applications that immersive technologies might have that are.
00:17:19 Dr Paul Clarke
That are for the people.
00:17:20 Dr Paul Clarke
That are that are for good sort of immersive technologies.
00:17:23 Dr Paul Clarke
The good if you like rather than the kinds of corporate and commercial applications that that we’re currently imagining, I’m interested.
00:17:32 Dr Paul Clarke
What the social and civic applications might be of immersive technologies.
00:17:38 Dr Paul Clarke
And ways in which we as a university as people working in creative technology as people working in art contexts, can intervene and can offer other possible uses for immersive technologies that are not simply commercial uses. As a theatre maker, I am also, you know, excited by the potential for.
00:17:58 Dr Paul Clarke
Bringing immersive technologies together with theater to realize impossible and imaginary stenographers, and to bring together live performers with virtual.
00:18:09 Dr Paul Clarke
Task and to you know, to start to to make things possible in, in theater spaces and in site specific contexts that that haven’t been previously in ways that we can playfully bring fictions or imagination together with reality and overlay them and explore the the differences between those.
00:18:30 Dr Paul Clarke
Those spices, yeah.
00:18:31 Ruby Lott-Lavigna
Great. That’s very interesting to look forward to. Going back to Bristol, could you give us some information on the new immersive arts MA and what prospective students might expect from it?
00:18:40 Dr Paul Clarke
So what’s exciting about the new immersive arts? MA is in part it’s interdisciplinarity, and that it’s taught alongside the.
00:18:48 Dr Paul Clarke
See Immersive technologies, virtual and augmented reality, and that’s quite distinctive. Bristol, I think, is one of the only universities that’s offering an interdisciplinary program in that way. Quite often you have the opportunity to study immersive arts and to develop creative content for.
00:19:08 Dr Paul Clarke
Immersive experiences?
00:19:09 Dr Paul Clarke
But you don’t necessarily have people studying alongside you who have the technical skills that might be necessary to realise the interactions that you design and to do the the programming that might be necessary to realize these innovative, immersive experiences that you’re coming up with. So those students will come together in teams with the immersive.
00:19:30 Dr Paul Clarke
Our students, hopefully developing engaging, creative content, immersive content.
00:19:35 Dr Paul Clarke
Whilst the uh creative technology students, the students on the immersive technologies MSC, will be able to realize those immersive works will be able to to do the the necessary coding and programming and 3D design. So that’s one of the things that I think is exciting. The immersive arts MA is responding.
00:19:55 Dr Paul Clarke
Clearly, to a particular demand from the immersive industries and from the creative industries, and that demand is for people with the expertise to work across disciplines to.
00:20:06 Dr Paul Clarke
Work in teams that have people in them from science backgrounds and people in them, from art backgrounds, and to bring that skills and expertise together. And what we’re interested in is people who have expertise. For instance, in filmmaking, theater, TV, in creative writing.
00:20:27 Dr Paul Clarke
For instance, who are interested in translating that expertise into the context of?
00:20:33 Dr Paul Clarke
Making engaging, immersive content and addressing some of the challenges that come with that. So, for instance, thinking about immersive storytelling, thinking about non-linear narratives, thinking about how we make work for audiences and participants who have agency, who can choose where to look.
00:20:54 Dr Paul Clarke
And choose where to go and thinking for instance, about how they can translate.
00:20:59 Dr Paul Clarke
Their skills, their expertise. For instance, their skills into immersive environments and writing, engaging immersive content.
00:21:10 Ruby Lott-Lavigna
And and finally, can I just ask why would you recommend this course to prospective students?
00:21:14 Dr Paul Clarke
I would recommend this course to prospective students, partly because of.
00:21:19 Dr Paul Clarke
The innovative research that Bristol is doing in this area, both in the context of technologies innovation in engineering and also the innovation that we’re doing in arts, imagining new forms of immersive experience.
00:21:36 Dr Paul Clarke
This now I would encourage people to come to Bristol to take this course, partly because of the strength of the immersive industries in this region and and in the city, and there’s a lot happening in this sector, for instance outlook, Pervasive Media Studio, the the residents there at the PM studio at Watershed. But yeah, the immersive industries are really thriving here in the South.
00:21:58 Dr Paul Clarke
Guest and we will be bringing a number of those companies. We’ll be bringing exciting immersive companies and creative technologies in to to demonstrate their work to the students. And yeah, to speak with students on the.
00:22:13 Dr Paul Clarke
Course yeah, I would encourage students to take immersive arts at Bristol because of the potential to work in interdisciplinary ways to bring together expertise in creative arts and knowledge of computing and programming. So to bring together science and arts to.
00:22:33 Dr Paul Clarke
Invent new futures uh for immersive experiences and new applications for immersive technologies.
00:22:41 Ruby Lott-Lavigna
Great. Thank you so much for taking us on that journey. Thank you so much for your time and for such a inspiring conversation.
00:22:48 Dr Paul Clarke
Thanks very much. Thanks for having me.
00:22:54 Ruby Lott-Lavigna
Thank you for listening to research from tears from Bristol University. We hope you found inspiration, information, answers and more in all of these great conversations. Don’t forget to check in over www.bristol.ac.uk/study/postgraduate for more details on Bristol courses and information about Bristol University.
00:23:12 Ruby Lott-Lavigna
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00:23:19 Ruby Lott-Lavigna
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00:23:20 Ruby Lott-Lavigna
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