London Trip
I set off early from St Neots yesterday for a Digital Media Production team visit to the Natural History Museum with colleagues from years 2 and 3.
Arriving at South Kensington Tube Station it was a short hop to the museum where the key reasons for the visit were to see some of the exhibitions designed by one of the course tutors, James Norton and to see the Our Story exhibition narrated by Sir David Attenborough – who celebrates his centenary birthday later this year.
Someone was even longer in the tooth than me:
I made a short video of clips from the trip
We visited the Visions of Nature exhibition – a mixed reality experience which gave me a few ideas for the ‘Victorian Machines’ project:
https://www.saolastudio.com/en-gb
Saola Studio is a Paris-based creative studio specialising in augmented and mixed reality experiences for cultural institutions. Their work at the Natural History Museum in London, “Visions of Nature”, transports visitors 100 years into the future via Microsoft HoloLens 2 headsets, presenting eight richly imagined ecosystems in 2125 through interactive holographic animations and spatial storytelling. My “Victorian Machines” project sets the bicycle in 2085 where it reimagines the bicycle as a future – and futuristic- vehicle, Saola’s approach offers several valuable lessons. Their method of grounding speculative futures in credible research is directly applicable: just as they consulted NHM scientists to make 2125 feel plausible rather than fantastical. The learning for me is that I could anchor the bicycle’s redesign in real emerging technologies such as smart materials or urban mobility data. The layering of physical and virtual environments – whilst beyond my technical ability – suggests way to present my idea through mixed or augmented reality, allowing audiences to interact with the future bicycle rather than simply observe it. Most usefully, Saola demonstrates how future-world storytelling benefits from a clear narrative framework. Their AI guide, Hope, contextualises each scene with purpose. A similar guiding logic applied to my project could help audiences understand not just what your future bicycle looks like, but why it exists and what world it inhabits – this character looks, at the moment, like a 118 year old version of me!
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