Projects

Current Projects

European Masters in Ludic Interfaces

This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. "Ludic Interfaces" is a Masters programme development on a European level. It is also the title of a European collaboration in creating a network of Academic Institutions and of world leading Media Centres to investigate, design and test publicly shared digital content. The programme development is a joint project by the University of Potsdam, Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, Universität für künstlerische und industrielle Gestaltung in Linz, and by the University of Salford.

Past Projects

AHRC Research Fellow in Creative and Performing Arts, 2008 to 2011

Tapio Mäkelä - Technologies of Location

Tapio Mäkelä's research project, Technologies of Location, explores new media art that uses different technologies (GPS, mobile networks, Wlan) to create cross-media experiences in urban places. He is interested in how affect of place is constructed through both everyday practices and designed cultural interfaces. "Technologies of location" paraphrases Jonathan Crary's Techniques of the observer, and asks whether location based perception is a continuation of modernity as a visual technology, or do mobile and tactile technologies enable parallel, invisible yet "sensible" realities. The research project will result in a book, and media art works. His project partners include FACT (Liverpool), Sarai (Delhi), Futuresonic Festival (Manchester) and Imagination@Lancaster (Lancaster University).

The Vice-Chancellor’s Iconic Projects For MediaCityUK

Salford Metaverse Campus

This project concerns the proliferating use of social networking platforms for creative and innovative applications in research and teaching across the schools of Art & Design, Environment & Life Sciences, Computing, Science & Engineering and Health Care Professions. The focus will be on multi-user virtual environments, specifically Second Life, as an interdisciplinary platform to enable a number of diverse objectives that include:

• To conceptually identify and create a virtual manifestation of the Salford University Media City campus within Second Life that intertwines and combines the diversity of research activity across the partner Schools and the wider University.
• To create mixed reality interfaces to the Salford online Second Life virtual environment that act as a communications portal between the Peel Park and Media City campuses, bridging the physical distance between the University sites and bringing the activities of advanced research, enterprise, postgraduate programmes and undergraduate teaching closer together.
• To consolidate the diverse range of related research between the schools and disseminate leading edge new media arts, creative technology and future media research under one umbrella, generating critical mass and international recognition of our multi-user virtual environment research and innovation projects.
• To build on existing and new world class research in the area of multi-user virtual environments and identify new research funding proposals and interdisciplinary teams from across the University, inline with UK research council’s digital technology and economy agendas.

The aim of this research is to critically investigate how online participants in three-dimensional worlds, Second Life in particular, socially interact within innovative creative environments and appropriate these cultural experiences as part of their everyday lives. The programme brings together leading scholars and artists from the schools of Art & Design, Environment & Life Sciences, Computing, Science & Engineering and Health Care Professions to create the first multidisciplinary study of Second Life at Salford.

Situations & Collaboration between Second Life, Consensual Landscapes & Scenarios

A MaNet Action Research Project

This project brings the resources and expertise of three partner MaNet Institutions together; Liverpool ICDC, Folly Lancaster and Salford University, to undertake collaborative research into the possible assimilation of, and between, virtual online communities and the built and human environment. This is a mixed realities research project that will address the current virtual community developments and needs such as Second Life. The three partner investigators will establish a networked Second Life environment in the North West to make feasibility test and prototype practice based research experiments between the Lancaster, Liverpool, Manchester triangle. This is a speculative research project and each member has taken a specific area of interests as an individual starting point that concerns the umbrella research question. It is envisaged that these research strands will meet at a point of convergence towards the middle of the project that will be manifested in a number of possible outcomes and new directions that will include practical applications as well as future research funding.

Supported by MaNet Media Arts Network North West and Arts Council England

See the website

Picnic on the Screen

Virtual Picnic at Glastonbury 2009

Creative technology researchers from the University have been developing innovative ways of engaging with the public through interactive art projects that make use of large format public video screen technology. At this year’s Glastonbury festival Professor Paul Sermon and Charlotte Gould from the School of Arts & Media developed a project called ‘Picnic on the Screen’ for the BBC’s Village Screen.

The screen was a new addition to the Festival and let members of the public appear inside a virtual world which they could interact with, while allowing Paul and Charlotte to reach over 177,000 people with their work. Paul said: “Picnic on the Screen allowed us to explore the creative potential of the Glastonbury audience as participants or performers to create playful improvised narrative sequences.”

Festival-goers took part in the virtual picnic by using two separate picnic blankets, which were specially created using chroma-key technology similar to that used by TV weather presenters. The audience sat on the blankets and were captured by cameras which projected them onto the screen, and motion tracking enabled them to have virtual interactions with Charlotte’s surreal picnic items and animated characters.

Experimentation and improvisation form an important element of Paul and Charlotte’s work, and for once the traditional Glastonbury rain turned out to have hidden benefits. Forced to use tarpaulin instead of their normal blue screen mats, they discovered that the cheaper material actually enhanced the interactive experience. Paul and Charlotte are now hoping to develop new interactive projects for the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad, when big screens will be set up in major cities across the country.

REACT (Research Engine for Art and Creative Technology)

Led by Paul Sermon, Professor of Creative Technology at the University of Salford, the programme draws world-class practice-based researchers to Salford and Manchester, in order to provide valuable experience and inspiration to up-and-coming researchers, and to create a collaborative environment that can establish and enrich creative links between researchers.

The University of Salford's Adelphi Research Institute for Creative Arts and Sciences, in collaboration with Manchester Metropolitan University's Institute for Research and Innovation in Art and Design (MIRIAD) received an AHRC Collaborative Research Training Scheme grant, to run the REACT series of lectures. Building upon the existing REACT research community, this provides valuable training opportunities for PhD students with an interest in cutting-edge practice-based research. Furthermore, the programme aims to develop an invaluable web resource which will benefit artists and research worldwide.

The Teleporter Zone

Commissioned by Guy's and St Thomas' Charity, The Teleporter Zone is situated in the ground floor of The Evelina Children’s Hospital, known as Ocean. It provides patients and their friends and family members with a chance to be transported from the confines of the hospital waiting area to imaginary and fantastical virtual worlds. It is the first interactive telematic art installation of this kind to have been developed for a hospital.

Created by Paul Sermon, Professor of Creative Technology at the University of Salford, the installation relays live video images between two spaces so that visitors sitting in different places can be seen on a television screen in the same virtual environment. The installation enables children to perform and interact on ‘television’ and aims to distract them (and their families and carers) from the worry of being in hospital. Children can see themselves on screen in a variety of settings: on a pirate ship, in an aeroplane, in a spaceship, in a king and queen’s throne, in front of the Taj Mahal, in the ocean, surrounded by cuddly toys on a sofa, floating with the clouds, on the beach and in a circus tent. Each sequence last two minutes enabling children to have fun and interact with their tele-visual surroundings