Throughout the development of our project, we have received enquiries about how the Ghost Hunt project could act as a model for work in other spaces and with other audiences. We have been asked directly by project partners, participants and industry professionals to take the Ghost Hunt project to other audiences and spaces. With follow-on funding, we will adapt the existing Digital Ghost Hunt experience for a new heritage venue in collaboration with Pilot Theatre in York, and deliver it to newer and more diverse audiences. We will do this through adapting the existing performance framework, collaborating with our new partner on how it could work in the space, presenting new performances and by inviting commercial, creative and academic partners as well as other interested stakeholders to our final symposium. The results of this work to widen the impact of the work will be presented publicly and published across academic and other spaces. With the Digital Ghost Hunt, we wanted to re-frame digital technologies as accessible to agency, making and creativity, and to design an augmented and highly participatory experience that doesn't shut the physical world out, but instead deepens our embodied interaction with it. Augmented reality (AR) experience has an advantage over VR, in that it doesn't limit your physical movement or sensory inputs. We also wanted to emphasise that technology is a tool and an extension of our physical capacity, and framed the initial encounter with technological learning as a facilitated maker space in the classrooms of two Year 5 groups in Shaftesbury Park Primary School. The 'ghost hunt' itself took place in Battersea Art Centre, a heritage building that was filled with digital and traditional stage technologies supporting a deeply embedded narrative. The participating students used hand-built 'ghost hunt devices' to collaborate around unearthing the secrets of the building to solve the mystery, and release the ghosts. With the follow-on funding, we want to scale the impact and reach of the production, and adapt it for new and broader audiences to test its commercial potential and maximise the return on the initial investment of resources. In order to successfully scale the experience without losing the immersion of the initial, intimate encounter, our team will adapt the existing production for four new performances in York with Pilot Theatre, aimed at two large secondary school audiences and two mixed-age family audiences (with children from 10 years of age and up). We will re-formulate the way audiences first encounter the experience, and adapt the scenography to support close-range interaction with larger and older audiences. To maximise impact and knowledge exchange, we will organise a closing symposium for creative industry practitioners and researchers in academia and the digital economy at Sussex Humanities Lab. Here, we will be able to share and disseminate experience gained in the course of the project, but also refine our ways of defining and assessing immersive experience and audience engagement. Finally, we will publish an additional article based on the research undertaken in the initial phase of the project reflecting on the widened impact of the work in the peer-reviewed literature, and take the work to specialist industry conferences as well as academic meetings to further disseminate the results. With these knowledge transfer activities, we hope to contribute to the broader genre and its critical framework across theatre and performance studies, creative production in AR/VR, participatory games and audience studies.

The Digital Ghost Hunt is an immersive storytelling experience that transforms coding and digital technology from something foreign and mysterious into a tool of the imagination. In its first implementation, the Digital Ghost Hunt immersive experience will be realised in the historic Battersea Arts Centre (BAC), with a narrative that explore the building's rich historical memory using the creative spirit of an earlier era of open-ended technological experimentation. The key objective of The Digital Ghost Hunt is to present technology to students as an empowering tool, where coding emerges as - and fuses with - different forms of storytelling. It seeks to shift the context in which Key Stage 2 students see coding, engaging groups who may be uninterested in or feel excluded by digital technology, to open up an imaginative space through play for them to discover the creative potential of technology on their own terms. For this pilot project, we will publish code libraries and instructions for affordable hardware kits, and write an initial narrative formed around the fictive Ministry of Paranormal Hygiene. Learning facilitators will appear in class as a team of Ministry scientists, led by the Deputy Undersecretary of Paranormal Hygiene, to initiate their training. Using Raspberry Pi microprocessor kits, their first task will be to program their detection devices. During this phase students will be introduced to the basic logic of programming: variables, looping and decision structures. They will be taught how to use the high-level API (Application Interface) to query their sensors for information, store it and display it. The emphasis will be on students taking ownership of their devices, deciding which of the ghost detectors they want to build and how it works. When they are ready, students will begin their first hunt at a haunted historical building. Students will use the devices they've built to discover clues and research the history of the building to discover the ghost's identity. The ghost will in turn communication with them, given life by actors, practical effects and the poltergeist potential of the Internet of Things. Together students will unravel the mystery of the ghost's haunting, and help set it free.