Open Adventures
Masters Project
Presented at BEYOND 2022
A year long project exploring ways to make accessing Dartmoor national park more accessible and inclusive for people who currently face barriers. The project developed immersive experiences to bring the feelings of the moors to where people are at, cutting through some of the transport cost barriers.
Project Context
Through the iMayflower project I was selected to work with Dartmoor National Park Authority along with a student on the MA Heritige course to work over the course of the year on a project. Open Adventures is the name I gave to my exploration of access, immersion, and user journies within my course. While the prototypes and work done soley within the project was refered to by JUMP (joining up moors and people). The project took a paticipatory design approach, as we partnersed with a community group in the Devonport neighbourhood to inform the work we do, and as one of our test audiences for the full-dome short film that was produced.
Challenge space
In developing the project early on the challenge space was tough to pin down to one specific area, to both be in the interest area of Dartmoor National Park Authority(DNPA), and my personal interests in the realm of the course. Understanding the barriers and challenges people were facing getting to and engaging with was key early on, with transport being a key barrier mentioned, amongst others. Thing came up in conversations with students, people from an adventures and expeditions society, and people from the timebank Devonport volunteering group. These connections and engagements used a variety of different methods and tools to try and help prompt discussion and understanding.
Development
After playing around with many different concepts, the aim of creating an immersive short film utilising Plymouth's unique dome theatre was set. While developing that the need for a more portable flexible experience came up, which led to the addition of the non narrative based Dartmoor Viewer VR App for the oculus quest. I lead the development and production of both prototypes, storyboarding, filming and editing the film and sketching, designing and coding the VR application.
Larger Idea
The main part of the project explored was the use of immersive technology, but I also wanted to make sure we looked at the larger picture of how these new experiences fit into the larger journey of experience. I created a prototype journey planner, and accessibility information tool, that would help take people from engaging with content, to engaging with the park in the physical environment.
Response
In testing the experiences with a variety of people, the response was quite positive and showed a good connection to place. There were opportunities to expand the content, and to think more about the journey of getting the headset on someone's head while understanding the control schema.
