Makeactive UK: an exploration of Virtual Reality Maker Spaces for multi-user, collaborative design at a distance

We are fortunate to be tackling the global challenge that COVID-19 presents at a time when technology can provide high-fidelity, real-time, visual, and auditory information at scale; the 'Zoom-call' is essential to daily activity. A particular challenge of remote working is collaborating when direct touch -- either between people or via shared objects and spaces -- is an essential component, whether for medicine, communication, teaching, or design. For the sight-impaired community, many aspects of education, such as art and design courses, are exclusively a "hand's-on" activity. Sharing and communicating design ideas is almost impossible without the ability to "visualize" the creation and for the sight-impaired user to visualize through touch and sound. This means, that in an exclusively audio-visual online world, there is no provision for the sight-impaired to access education which requires sharing and collaborating with 2D or 3D design process, effectively cutting this community off from the benefits of online, digital interaction, that others in the education system take for granted. Indeed, the pace of change is so fast now, traditional, in-person collaborative education spaces are disappearing altogether.

We believe there is the opportunity to take state of the art immersive, haptic (touch) technologies to solve challenges in other domains e.g. education and the creative industries, and apply them to create touch-enabled, online digital "maker spaces" aimed at provisioning remote learners with an entirely new platform for education in the disciplines of arts, crafts, design, and engineering.

This project will lay the groundwork for addressing this substantial but crucial challenge by working closely with a broad range of stakeholders from the sight-impaired and creative design communities. From this project, we can better understand their current behaviors and how their needs would map onto an online, digital equivalent. We will balance this subjective approach with a more objective investigation into the practicalities by taking an existing, proven technology stack that is being used to experiment with shared, interaction with real-time touch feedback and adjusting it sufficiently to allow designers to experience what a collaborative, online 3D touch-enabled design space might be like.

We will combine these two strands to form a clear understanding of a strategy to go forward and address the exciting but substantial challenge of opening the digital collaborative experience, not just the sight-impaired, but any design practitioner who would benefit from the internet where touch is not as well provisioned as sight and sound today.