Digital Ghost Hunt - Impact and Engagement

Throughout the development of our project, we have received enquiries about how the Ghost Hunt project could act as a model for work in other spaces and with other audiences. We have been asked directly by project partners, participants and industry professionals to take the Ghost Hunt project to other audiences and spaces. With follow-on funding, we will adapt the existing Digital Ghost Hunt experience for a new heritage venue in collaboration with Pilot Theatre in York, and deliver it to newer and more diverse audiences. We will do this through adapting the existing performance framework, collaborating with our new partner on how it could work in the space, presenting new performances and by inviting commercial, creative and academic partners as well as other interested stakeholders to our final symposium. The results of this work to widen the impact of the work will be presented publicly and published across academic and other spaces.

With the Digital Ghost Hunt, we wanted to re-frame digital technologies as accessible to agency, making and creativity, and to design an augmented and highly participatory experience that doesn't shut the physical world out, but instead deepens our embodied interaction with it. Augmented reality (AR) experience has an advantage over VR, in that it doesn't limit your physical movement or sensory inputs. We also wanted to emphasise that technology is a tool and an extension of our physical capacity, and framed the initial encounter with technological learning as a facilitated maker space in the classrooms of two Year 5 groups in Shaftesbury Park Primary School. The 'ghost hunt' itself took place in Battersea Art Centre, a heritage building that was filled with digital and traditional stage technologies supporting a deeply embedded narrative. The participating students used hand-built 'ghost hunt devices' to collaborate around unearthing the secrets of the building to solve the mystery, and release the ghosts.

With the follow-on funding, we want to scale the impact and reach of the production, and adapt it for new and broader audiences to test its commercial potential and maximise the return on the initial investment of resources. In order to successfully scale the experience without losing the immersion of the initial, intimate encounter, our team will adapt the existing production for four new performances in York with Pilot Theatre, aimed at two large secondary school audiences and two mixed-age family audiences (with children from 10 years of age and up). We will re-formulate the way audiences first encounter the experience, and adapt the scenography to support close-range interaction with larger and older audiences.

To maximise impact and knowledge exchange, we will organise a closing symposium for creative industry practitioners and researchers in academia and the digital economy at Sussex Humanities Lab. Here, we will be able to share and disseminate experience gained in the course of the project, but also refine our ways of defining and assessing immersive experience and audience engagement. Finally, we will publish an additional article based on the research undertaken in the initial phase of the project reflecting on the widened impact of the work in the peer-reviewed literature, and take the work to specialist industry conferences as well as academic meetings to further disseminate the results. With these knowledge transfer activities, we hope to contribute to the broader genre and its critical framework across theatre and performance studies, creative production in AR/VR, participatory games and audience studies.

'Digital Ghost Hunt - Impact and Engagement' expands the impact of the original project by reaching an even wider range of audiences. Its beneficiaries and information about each are listed below. This follow-on funding expands the number of initial beneficiaries and reaches audiences who have expressed interest but were not originally a part of the original work.

BENEFICIARIES:

Students and Teachers in Secondary Education
We are expanding the reach of the project within the education sector to include more than solely those in primary education/KS2 who participated in the initial performances.

Families
A new audience demographic that emerged from feedback during the initial project. They will take part in the project at the new performances at Pilot Theatre in York.

Creative Industry Practitioners in Augmented Reality and Immersive Theatre
Through the additional presentations of the work and the symposium, we are able to share knowledge emerging from the project and the process of adapting the initial performance for wider audiences and other spaces.

Maker Cultures & Communities
The project's emphasis on agency in relation to, and appropriation of, technology maintains its roots in the maker communities within technology and theatre. This relationship to maker cultures will be maintained and we will add to the materials shared during initial work under a Creative Commons license (such as the project's source code and 3d models commissioned for creating the ghost-hunting devices).


WIDENING DISSEMINATION:

The project will be disseminated more widely through in part through the additional performances for new and wider audiences. The number of artefacts will increase as we reuse and replicate the materials and technologies initially produced (such as the 'ghost detectors' themselves). The actual live performances and related documentation will be refined as a result of the work to adapt the framing and introduction of the experience (whose narrative and key characters remain otherwise unchanged). The code libraries and additional assets on Github will be refined/updated.

The project website, already a repository for information relating to the research undertaken in the initial project, will be supplemented with material relating to the further dissemination of the work. Summary discussions of different aspects of the project and the teaching materials developed initially will be augmented with information from this work to widen the engagement and increase the impact of the work.

The articles and presentations exploring the initial project (on our findings and describing the Digital Ghost hunt 'tool kit' with methodologies for mentoring and facilitation and references to code libraries) will be complemented with materials including a journal article and material from conference presentations. They will focus on our work with wider audiences and scaling methodologies relating to the immersive aesthetic in performance and portable cultures.

A symposium at the Sussex Humanities Lab, aimed at creative industry practitioners and organisations as well as academic researchers, offers a new space to share our explorations of scalability in immersive interactive experience design. It also provides a space to widen the impact of the work through further exploration of how knowledge in our communities can be effectively leveraged to benefit the wider industry. In the initial project meetings, commercial and academic partners expressed interest in our project framework raising specific questions about scaling this kind of work. With this follow-on funding, they may benefit from our work reconfiguring immersive performances for different audience demographics, in order to maximise impact and expand commercial potential in new and unexpected ways.