EXPLORE THE WORLD FROM LIVERPOOL

by Roz Lloyd
27th March 2020

Just because you can’t go outside doesn’t mean you can’t explore.

Many Liverpool arts organisations are streaming content to bring culture into the home, and World Museum Liverpool has gone one step further. Working with Liverpool John Moores University’s immersive arts department, the team has created a virtual tour of the World Cultures gallery for you to explore without leaving the house. Be a tourist in Liverpool and experience one of the city’s greatest cultural assets – risk-free. Start the tour here.

World Cultures gallery

Emma Martin, senior curator at World Museum, says: “Thanks to public feedback on what people would like to see, we’ve created a virtual tour of the World Cultures gallery with our friends at Liverpool John Moores University. Through the use of this emerging immersive technology you can catch up on history, natural science and anthropology by exploring the museum’s extensive collections.”

The Liverpool John Moores University team who worked on this project included Peter Woodbridge (Programme Leader for Immersive Arts), Peter Horricks (Lecturer in Architecture) and Mark Wright (Lecturer in Fine Arts), alongside the students on the brand new MA in Immersive Arts. Woodbridge said: “It’s great that our students and staff can help museums to get some of their spaces online using immersive technologies. Learning doesn’t have to stop outside of the official designated environments, it’s much more fluid now, and it’s brilliant to see the museum working out ways to engage with people not able to visit the venue.” 

Liverpool World Museum interior

The pioneering MA Immersive Arts course was launched in 2019 by Liverpool Screen School and Liverpool School of Art and Design. It explores immersive storytelling experiences, augmented reality, projection mapping, interactive environments, holographics and mixed reality content production and experience design, using dedicated lab facilities with access to cutting-edge equipment, software and practical research expertise. The course enables students to develop the next generation of spatial experiences in an industry that will have a huge growth over the next decade, and Liverpool is providing the talent pipeline.

Revealing more about the UK’s first Immersive Arts postgraduate course, Programme Leader Peter Woodbridge said: “It’s a really exciting time to be working at the intersection of creativity, storytelling, digital arts and emerging technology. Students will be investigating and inventing new ways to engage audiences in spatial story and arts experiences by learning about what happens when our definitions of media arts go beyond the screen. It’s about making new possibilities, ideas, experiences, installations and applications for engaging audiences across a number of areas.” And the best part for us is that it’s in Liverpool – a city with a history of innovation across games, film and creative technology (Immersive Economy Report, 2019).

It’s not just our universities leading the way. The Studio School, which is based in the Baltic Triangle, is a creative and digital school for 14-19 year olds. It prepares its students for successful careers in the creative and digital industries, whether that’s continual education or straight into employment. The teaching team are experts in the subjects they teach, with years of experience working in education as well as businesses within the creative and digital sectors – this gives the students the most well-rounded education based on industry standards. 

Enda Carey, Sector Skills Champion said: ‘The Studio School’s curriculum features immersive arts in many subject areas including scripting, programming, games, animation and VFX courses. We have students who have chosen to work with immersive tech in their project based learning class – they are very early prototypes but really exciting to see pupils utilise this new tech. We have looked at immersive arts in topics like Fitness in VR, Mental Health VR projects, and gaming, and we look forward to seeing it being included more heavily in the national curriculum next year.’ 

So while confined to your home for the next few weeks, make sure you virtually visit Liverpool and join the other online tourists in our amazingly creative city. (Need something to look forward to for the light at the end of the tunnel? Plan your future visit to the city by connecting with visitliverpool.com and use the ‘Do it your Way’ planner.)

Roz Lloyd
Roz Lloyd
Marketing Manager
27th March 2020