TRANSMIXR
eXtended Reality (XR) already plays a big role in sectors like gaming, health care and education, allowing for immersive experiences. How can the cultural and creative industries benefit from immersive technologies as well? TRANSMIXR investigates opportunities, challenges and barriers for meaningful use of XR within our sector, aiming to increase accessibility by creating standardized workflows and reusable templates for immersive experiences.
eXtended Reality (XR) already plays a big role in sectors like gaming, health care and education, allowing for immersive experiences. How can the cultural and creative industries benefit from immersive technologies as well? TRANSMIXR investigates opportunities, challenges and barriers for meaningful use of XR within our sector, aiming to increase accessibility by creating standardized workflows and reusable templates for immersive experiences.
Illustration: XR allows cultural heritage to be experienced in an immersive way.
What is eXtended Reality?
There are several immersive technologies that expand our perception of reality, such as Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR) and Mixed Reality (MR). XR is a term that encompasses all these immersive technologies. As XR continues to evolve, the future of immersive experiences is filled with endless opportunities — and equally exciting challenges! TRANSMIXR investigates how XR can be used as a tool to create meaningful interactions within three domains of the cultural and creative industries:
- Cultural Heritage
- Performing Arts
- News Broadcast
TRANSMIXR aims to make XR more accessible and scalable for the sector. For the cultural heritage domain, TRANSMIXR is working on several solutions.
Solutions
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Methods for storytelling with rich collection metadata
XR projects often depend on expensive 3D asset creation as their central storytelling tool. TRANSMIXR takes a different approach by transforming existing collection metadata into immersive narratives.
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Reusable immersive storytelling format
The TRANSMIXR XR template can be iteratively updated with new data and content. This versatility allows cultural heritage institutions to utilise the same template across multiple projects, covering diverse topics, resulting in cost-effective immersive experiences.
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Social XR production workflow
Through incorporating Social XR into the production process, TRANSMIXR streamlines collaboration by improving stakeholders’ comprehension and discussion of creative concepts and technical possibilities within XR.
Through these innovations, TRANSMIXR paves the way for a new era of immersive storytelling—one that is inclusive, sustainable, and adaptable.
Role Sound & Vision: Creating Meaningful Interactions with Cultural Heritage in Immersive Environments
Imagine stepping into the hidden depot of a museum collection: aisles of cupboards and boxes, yellowed name tags assigning years to objects, the faint, stale scent of time past. Each object holds a story, but what remains of these stories if no one sees them? At Sound & Vision, it is our goal to change that. Through TRANSMIXR, we are imagining a way to experience cultural heritage material without the physical limits of a museum or an archive - in a playful way. We aim to expand the sector’s ideas of what exhibitions are and how curation works, embracing interactivity and engaging storytelling.
Illustration: In the social VR game The Space Archivists, players can explore the archive.
The Space Archivists
We are not only making a template - we are also working on our own immersive experience. Together with our project partners Khora and CWI, Sound & Vision is developing the social VR installation The Space Archivists. The Space Archivists is a multiplayer game that allows end-users to interact and engage with cultural heritage objects. The setting: In a futuristic sci-fi scenario, an archive has been sent to space to preserve the memory of humanity. But the items got all mixed up in a meteorite storm! In 3 games, the player's task is to fix the archive by putting all media items back in place.
The game becomes templatable through the curator interface - here curators can put in datasets allowing them to easily create new themes for the experience.
Future & Past Events
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Design Salons
To better understand how XR can provide value to both professional curators in cultural heritage institutions as well as visitors who experience these technologies, a series of design salons was organised. These workshops brought together curators, researchers, and other stakeholders in order to create a workflow and reusable template suitable for the sector.
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Workshop: Beyond Virtual Museums
For ITW 2024 in Rotterdam, we developed a workshop where we collectively imagine new interactive exhibition formats with cultural heritage. While the goal for the workshop is for imaginations to run wild, it keeps in mind the barriers that may prevent organizations of various sizes and capacities from integrating XR into their long-term audience engagement strategies.
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Cinekid Medialab
You don't create a VR game overnight - many prototypes and hours of testing precede the end result. In the fall of 2024, TRANSMIXR was at Cinekid's Medialab, where a group of enthusiastic kids played a paper prototype of The Space Archivists! This allowed us to test the game mechanics and adjust where necessary.
Partners
For the cultural heritage use case, Sound & Vision works together with Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI), Khora, the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) and the Technological University of the Shannon: Midlands Midwest (TUS).
All of TRANSMIXR’s consortium partners:
TUS Midlands Midwest, CWI, VUB, Modul Technology, HSLU, CERTH, Trinity College Dublin, Intel, VRAI, Story Pact, Khora, Web Lyzard Technology, Immersion, F6S, TG4, AFP, RTV SLO, Baltic Film & Creative Tech Cluster, Sound & Vision, Spark, Satore Studio, EBU.
This project has been funded by the European Union as part of the Horizon Europe Framework Program (HORIZON), under the grant agreement 101070109.
