Designing, Connecting, Immersing

Context

This element of the Unpath’d Waters project is looking at new audiences for maritime heritage and new and exciting ways of reaching them.

Working together with communities we have co-designed a Virtual Reality environment and created an immersive research experience, called the Unpath Navigator. This allows users to explore, question, and enjoy the world of maritime heritage.

Aim

In this Activity, researchers have worked with community groups to co-design and build a digital immersive experience in Virtual Reality.

It is often argued that right now there isn’t enough cross-disciplinary and cross-collection use of maritime datasets, nor enough public access. This means that people can’t get the most out of the existing datasets. Our immersive experience opens up collections to new lines of research as well as reaching a new and diverse range of public audiences.

We haved co-developed new ways to interact with integrated maritime datasets (natural and cultural), specifically using immersive systems. We’ve chosen three underrepresented audiences to trial this approach with. They are:

• Cross-disciplinary researchers in maritime environment and heritage
• People with visual impairments, who have specific accessibility challenges
• Non-coastal communities with traditionally less engagement with maritime heritage

We don’t just want to reach new audiences, but also to engage with them in new ways. One innovative method has been the development of ‘curated pathways’ through datasets. These are a guided tour through the data which showcases rich multimedia content, including video, 3D imaging, image and audio content and story-driven creative soundscapes.

Curated pathways have been designed together with audiences and communities, and have also showcased the wider work of the Unpath project, specifically that concerning submerged landscapes and the identification of submerged wrecks in the Irish Sea. Our co-designed curated pathways have thrown up surprising routes through the data. Stories that emerged have assessed themes linked to gender history, local and regional heritage, naval warfare, and maritime industries.

Outputs

In our co-design activities with our three test groups we are developed a bespoke user interface, as well as the aesthetics, functionality and content of our immersive system, incorporating their feedback from the very first stage of the design process. In our activities with our three groups, we have engaged with communities across the length of the UK

• For our Non-coastal community activities, we have been working alongside Galloway Glens Landscape Partnership, which has recruited a cohort of heritage-interested individuals based in southern Scotland.
• Our maritime researcher cohort, which contains historians, archaeologists, and underwater paleo-landscape researchers, is based in the northeast of England.
• Our visually impaired test group, recruited after consultations with various charities and visually impaired-aligned professional bodies, is based in London.

As the main phase of co-design draws to a close, we have gathered and analysed all of our data from our designers and are developing a full working prototype of the Unpath Navigator, our immersive system. We have designed the system to accommodate the needs of our visually impaired designers from the outset, to ensure an equitable and accessible user interface. The Unpath Navigator accesses and displays multiple heritage datasets in a virtual environment.

We have also worked together with the National Maritime Museums, as well as all the other Unpath’d Waters partners, to deliver the Unpath Navigator to public audiences through an exhibition that visited venues all over the UK, including London, Orkney, the Isle of Man, and many more across all four nations.

We are now in the reporting stage of the project. There are two work package publications being developed which will publish the results of our co-design activities as well as demonstrate our technical achievements.

Activity collaborators

• SimVis
• MOLA
• University of St Andrews
• NMM (also all other partners in some way or other, especially University of Bradford and University of Southampton)