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In a deliberate and valiant effort to adapt to the conditions created by the recent pandemic, many theatre companies across the globe shifted their activities from the stage to online video platforms. But in releasing large portions of their back-catalogues at speed, opportunities to make such shows accessible have been under-exploited. This migration has created an unprecedented opportunity to examine the way accessible practices are transferred from stage to screen and has brought into sharp focus the somewhat inadequate provision for accessibility of online video platforms. While the very practice of making these shows available online, often at no cost to the viewer, has made them more socially accessible, practical accessibility for portions of the audience, such as the D/deaf community, has often been ignored or addressed in a low fidelity way. Through lack of time, lack of expertise or lack of resources, many companies have resorted to the use of auto-captioning tools, or the most basic of captions. Rarely do such captions come close to capturing the creativity of the shows they represent. This paper represents a call to arms for the development of bespoke tools to support better, more immersive and creative, retroactive captioning of stage productions presented as videos. Lay Summary In this article, we discuss how videos of stage performances can be subtitled in a way that is accurate and that preserves the creativity original performances. The recent pandemic forced theatre companies to adapt or perish. With playhouses closed, some companies moved their activities online. They either released old footage of their past shows and performances on video platforms such as YouTube but did not necessarily have the time or the right tools to make these videos accessible to members of the D/deaf community. One the one hand, their shows are more easily accessed since they can be found online, but on the other hand, whole sections of the general public, such as D/deaf people, still cannot accessed these videos because they are not subtitled. Most video platforms have built-in tools that can generate subtitles automatically, but these are not very precise and do not help to convey the creativity of the performances. The tools that are currently available are therefore not suitable and new tools need to be developed to provide access to D/deaf people and do justice to the performances.

Context can have a significant impact on liking, emotional response and product choice, and Virtual Reality (VR) is a promising tool to evoke realistic consumption contexts in a controlled testing environment. This study compared an innovative approach – combining a 360° video and a 3D model with object tracking to an Evoked context using pictures and sound recordings to simulate a realistic consumption environment for beer (i.e. bar). This study explored consumer experience of the innovative VR design and measured their engagement with it compared to an Evoked scenario. Additionally, participants’ emotional response and liking between the two contexts and the effect of including a VR training session prior to data collection were also explored. In total, 27 beer consumers participated in this study. The novel VR method that was developed for this study consisted of 360° video footage recorded in a bar with sound, which was projected around a virtual table model with an integrated questionnaire, using a pen and beer bottles attached to tracking devices. The Evoked context consisted of a picture slideshow and sound recording to simulate the exact same bar context. An interview was conducted after the VR training session to explore consumer experience of the VR design. Participant engagement was then measured after participants completed both the VR and Evoked sessions respectively. The results showed that the VR session had clear advantages in terms of participant engagement compared to the Evoked session. Audio, the time spent in VR, and realistically simulated presence of other people were identified as key elements that improved realism and immersion of the VR context, whilst low image quality and technical problems had the opposite effect. The first exposure to VR was shown to have high novelty and further impact on the emotional response to beer, which highlighted the importance of having a training/dummy session to reduce VR novelty and associated effect.

As computer interfaces spread across and even into our bodies, so we find ourselves engaged in ever more deeply connected bodily interactions. From the mouse and keyboard, to wearables and gestural...

We examine the experience of Thresholds , a virtual reality (VR) recreation of the world's first photographic exhibition, which has toured to multiple museums. Following the method of performance-led research in the wild, we provide an account of the artist's design rationale and the experiences of visitors as the work toured. We reveal how the overlaying and juxtaposing of virtual and physical spaces established a VR architecture that underpinned the extended user experience. Overlaying was used to layer a virtual model onto a corresponding physical set to deliver physical sensations of touch and movement alongside visual and audio stimuli. Juxtaposition was used to embed the VR installation within the surrounding gallery space at each host museum, dealing with the challenges of entering, exiting, spectating, and invigilating the experience. We propose that museum designers can use these techniques to deliver VR installations that are compelling but also scalable and tourable.

"So you're the one getting this gift? Lucky you! Someone who knows you has visited the museum. They searched out things they thought you would care about, and they took photos and left messages for you." This is the welcoming message for the Gift app, designed to create a very personal museum visit. Hybrid Museum Experiences use new technologies to augment, expand or alter the physical experience of visiting the museum. They are designed to be experienced in close relation to the physical space and exhibit. In this book we discuss three forms of hybridity in museum experiences: Incorporating the digital and the physical, creating social, yet personal and intimate experiences, and exploring ways to balance visitor participation and museum curation. This book reports on a 3-year cross-disciplinary research project in which artists, design researchers and museum professionals have collaborated to create technology-mediated experiences that merge with the museum environment.

The capture and analysis of diverse data is widely recognized as being vital to the design of new products and services across the digital economy. We focus on its use to inspire the co-design of visitor experiences in museums as a distinctive case that reveals opportunities and challenges for the use of personal data. We present a portfolio of data-inspired visiting experiences that emerged from a 3-year Research Through Design process. These include the overlay of virtual models on physical exhibits, a smartphone app for creating personalized tours as gifts, visualizations of emotional responses to exhibits, and the data-driven use of ideation cards. We reflect across our portfolio to articulate the diverse ways in which data can inspire design through the use of ambiguity, visualization, and inter-personalization; how data inspire co-design through the process of co-ideation, co-creation, and co-interpretation; and how its use must negotiate the challenges of privacy, ownership, and transparency. By adopting a human perspective on data, we are able to chart out the complex and rich information that can inform design activities and contribute to datasets that can drive creativity support systems.

Data is seen as the ‘new oil’ that drives the digital economy, and museums are no exception to this. We investigate how data captured from hybrid museum experiences can become a resource for designers, for museums, and for visitors in their understanding of a museum and a museum visit. We ground our discussion in three complementary case studies: Analysing visitors’ movements in a touring virtual reality exhibition called Thresholds; analysing their gifting behaviours in the Gift app; and capturing data about how designers used our Visitor Box cards.