Freelance Projects: Design Research and Digital Heritage (2021-Present)

3D models ©2021 Tramway Gallery and ISOdesign

Social VR Research for Tramway Revisited (2021)

With ISOdesign Ltd & Tramway Arts Centre, Glasgow
Part of the Innovate UK-funded Tramway Revisited R&D project in collaboration with Glasgow Museums, McGinlay Bell, Stageport and RVT Parametrix.

A commercial research project for ISOdesign exploring the possibilities of creating digital twins of museums and galleries in Social VR platforms to support the arts industry's post-COVID recovery. Using a rececent exhibition by Sammy Baloji and Bodys Isek Kingelez as a case study. I optimised a Hollywood-quality model of a Glasgow International biennale exhibition for streaming over the web, with support for 80 concurrent visitors in VR and Providing evidence-based recommendations and insights for how ISOdesign could expand their capabilities in the Social VR space. UKRI funders and other stakeholders were able to step into the VRChat twin of the exhibition together and experience a curator talk.

Animist International Animation Festival: The Animist’s Workshop VR - Ethnographic Animation of and with Immersive Technologies (2022)

As part of the 2022 Animist International Animation Festival, I conducted a three day workshop in 3D and VR technologies for animators and ethnographers with anthropologist Dr Huon Wardle. Participants developed short VR films and screened them on the final day of the festival.

I built a virtual ‘workshop’ for Oculus Quest to get participants used to thinking and making in VR. Participants inside VR encountered an array of digitised artefacts which they will be able to pick up, play with and arrange to tell stories. Through a virtual camera that could be placed in the environment, participants outside of VR had a window into the virtual world, and could storyboard shorts and could co-create stories for the VR users to play out, or observe their behaviour.

The asymmetry between experiences in VR and in 'meatspace' created challenges and opportunities participants had to navigate through collaboration. The virtual ‘workshop’ is a free-form, creative space unconstrained by normal laws of phyiscs, but participants wearing the VR headset were also blind to the outside world and to how their actions appeared ‘on camera’.

The session provided particpants opportunities to rethink some of the key activities ethnographers and animators involve themselves in: observing, participating, creating, analyzing, and becoming aware of the recursivity of their practice.

The workshop was funded by the European Regional Development Fund through an ASTRA measure project “TLU TEE or Tallinn University as the promoter of intelligent lifestyle” (no 2014-2020.4.01.16-0033).

Branching Out: Biophysical Data and Storytelling to Capture the Values of Trees (2024)

In June 2024 I was a Creative Research Associate on the AHRC, ESRC and NERC-funded Branching Out design project and worked in an interdisciplinary team of researchers, technologists and designers from the Universities of York and Loughborough to develop innovative new research tools to capture, analyse and interpret the biophysical, social and cultural values of urban treescapes in three UK cities: Cardiff, York and Milton Keynes.

Consultancy for The Estonian National Museum’s Who Claims the Night? VR Installation (2024)

Over several months in 2023, I advised Dr Carlo Cubero and his team on the technical implementation of their VR film installation ‘Moments in an Ordinary Night’ as part of the Estonian National Museum’s year-long exhibition ‘Who Claims the Night?’, a key component of Tartu’s celebrations for European Capital of Culture 2024. This included consulting on staging, sound, equipment and more. The exhibition ran from February 2024 to February 2025.

AR Experiments for Factum Arte (2019)

In July 2019, I interned at Factum Arte, a world-leading digital art studio. I developed several demos showcasing the potential of augmented reality, an area Factum had not yet explored.

To present a clear and compelling argument for AR, I looked at projects already in production, and thought of ways I could use AR complement or transform them in simple but effective ways.

I chose Factum’s experiments with elevated printing techniques to reproduce scanned flower specimens in collaboration with JamJar flowers. I built a mobile app that animated the flowers and overlaid information on them. Factum exhibited the app at Masterpiece Art Fair London in 2019.

D爱Y® Maki Wardle

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D爱Y®
Maki Wardle