Naiad: App-free audience interactivity, immersivity and accessibility for outdoor arts

Ludic Rooms make playful immersive and interactive experiences for unusual outdoor spaces. This research project brings together partners and practitioners from across disciplines to prototype Naiaid, a new custom web solution that powers interactive outdoor arts performances and immersive cultural experiences, with accessibility at the core of our approach.

The team will aim to use an all-abilities-first approach to develop new 5G enabled and app-free ways of empowering audiences to make outdoor work both more interactive and more inclusive; controlling sound, light and projection, influencing interactive narratives, revealing custom and self-directed story paths through outdoor experiences, and finding new ways of embedding captioning and audio description in ways that work for all participants, rather than an afterthought targeted solely at disabled audience members. We will work closely with access professionals and alongside critical friends with a broad range of abilities and lived experiences to develop new tools and approaches that build upon our existing track record in this area.

The proposed project will enable us to test the scalability of this new platform, expand its functionality and explore use cases for its exploitation in more sectors, with potential applications in live music, cultural and heritage venues as well as self-directed geolocated experiences in public green and blue spaces.

Coventry has a long standing international reputation for excellence in outdoor arts, bolstered further by our time as UK City of Culture, and this project will continue Ludic Room's partnerships with cultural organisations in the region, with whom we have a signed MoU, including many based at the Daimler Powerhouse Creation Centre, a dedicated and fully accessible space for the development of outdoor arts and site-specific work. This sector is of great importance to the region's creative sector, previously recognised by the £2.5m investment in Daimler's development through the Cultural Capital Investment Fund, resourced from Coventry City Council and the CWLEP Growth Deal.

This project gives unique opportunities to develop and test new digital creative innovation that exploits local sector expertise, with benefits that reach much further afield.