Summary The feeling of being immersed within a live performance by an ensemble of world class musicians can be a deeply engaging and highly valued cultural experience for audiences, as well as for the performers themselves. Operas, orchestral performances and musical theatre are popular and attract large followings, but they are costly and highly resource intensive to produce, particularly when the most talented performers are often located in different locations across the globe. Advanced audio-visual streaming technology can potentially provide solutions and new creative opportunities, and Edinburgh Napier University is at the forefront of this experimental work. However, the ENSEMBLE project will provide a complementary, human-centred focus on relatively under explored experiential aspects. The ENSEMBLE project will look at how musicians can perform live together, seamlessly as a group even though they are separated by distance, mediated through cutting-edge connection technologies. ENSEMBLE will examine the subjective, experiential and contextual factors that support high quality performance experiences, primarily from the perspective of the performers themselves, using qualitative and analytical methods. With the advent of super low latency network connections, the possibility has emerged for musicians, singers and actors to perform together in multiple remote locations in real time. The latency aspect has been a particular challenge for musicians where even a lag of 30 milliseconds may have an impact resulting in a significant deterioration in performance. With the resolution of some of these latency technical hurdles, additional more experiential challenges have emerged regarding the nuance of representation of remote performance partners of both the co-performer(s) and their audience. In its simplest terms, the question is how best should remote participants in a performance, be they co-performers (e.g. conductors and orchestras) or audience members, be represented to one another (visually, aurally and kinetically) to result in the most engaging, joyful and immersive experience for all involved? The ENSEMBLE project seeks to answer this question by exploring the potential of emerging technologies such as multi-person immersive dome environments (IDEs) to enable, enhance, extend and immerse performers and/or audiences in real-time during multi-location and distributed musical and theatrical performances. This in turn will provide insight into the parameters of influence of remote co-performance on both the performer and audience experience, in turn enabling the establishment of UX (user experience) and technological frameworks informing best practice when designing, developing and deploying such technologies into temporary and permanent physical performance spaces and scenarios.

Core Research Question: How successful have approaches to immersive technologies at major heritage sites in Scotland been currently, both in terms of outcomes against business plan expectations and in terms of visitor response, and what kinds of future development are supported by the evidence? Research Methods: The proposed Research Methods in this initial pilot phase will lay the groundwork for the exploration of the effectiveness and potential of the core Immersive Technology Research Question. Under the guidance of the PI and research team, the pilot project RA will set up a questionnaire to test visitor response to the immersive dimensions of the Culloden, Robert Burns Museum and Bannockburn sites, as well as at the Riverside Museum in Glasgow (which has secured one of the highest -if not the highest-non-traditional museum audience in the UK) and the National Library of Scotland at Kelvin Hall. In parallel, they will set up observations and a focus group round the proposed collections and policy developments at Newhailes by the National Trust for Scotland. These approaches will follow the methodology used by the PI's CDA to evaluate audience response among the 60 000 visitors to the When Glasgow Flourished exhibition in 2014 and by the PI's Beyond Text RA to evaluate responses to the material Burns January exhibition in the Mitchell Library, Glasgow in 2010 and 2011; and by the CI Economou's RA in three different immersive exhibitions in Rome, Athens, and Ename as part of the Marie Curie CHIRON project between 2005-2008 (Economou & Pujol Tost 2011). The project team will identify audience focus groups from the existing visitor and client contact base of the partner organizations, and will explore their visitor experience while also exposing them to new developments in Immersive Experience technology. Consideration will be given to the development of future 'Smart' response evaluations, such as Fitbit and smartphone visitor response monitoring. Immersive experiences are means of 'composing' memory (that is, creating the conditions in which the memories which are publicly expressed are those which are formulated within a range of socially acceptable contexts. In the motorized era, trails have fulfilled the same function of embedding preferred memory narratives, while immersive experiences-delivered in part or whole through the medium of technology-strive to present a fusion of memory, place and performance to create a close and lasting relationship of visitor memory to the experience purchased by the visit. Immersive technologies have (although research on this is not yet developed and its development is a key component of the proposed partnership) arguably similar effects to electronic mass media in the composure of memory, but effects which are possibly delivered in stronger and more lasting terms. We will also work with Soluis as our digital partner, to create a decision-making model for policy and audience development. Research Context: The research context is that of both the recent rapid growth of the heritage sector, and within that the centrality of cutting edge immersive experiences for tourism, the heritage industry and audience development The development of immersive experiences at 'fantasy' venues such as the London, York, Blackpool and Edinburgh 'Dungeons' from Merlin Entertainments is a connected activity. Some of these visitor experiences are relatively recent, and audience feedback is at an early stage: however, there is some evidence that fully or predominantly CGI immersive experiences such as Bannockburn are less appealing and effective to a comprehensive audience demographic than they are to particular groups. Research Outputs: Website, a policy paper, a risk assessment, a visualization decision making tool and presentations at the AHRC Showcase, and connected events-e.g. presentations at DH conferences and a media/social media strategy.

This project seeks to explore ways to educate the consumer about the sustainability, craftsmanship, heritage and value of traditional fashion and textile products, using a variety of mediums such as film and immersive technologies, leading to the following questions: 1. How can new developments in Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (MR) and Mixed Reality (MR) be used to communicate the human involvement, heritage, provenance, sustainability and therefore value of traditional fashion and textile products to consumers? 2. How can new developments in AR, VR and MR be used to preserve the history and heritage of traditional fashion and textile products? 3. What support is required for creative industries (fashion and textile design, fashion advertisers and marketers, museums and galleries) to access and use immersive technologies to engage with a wider range of consumers, across different cultures, and ensure that value and heritage is fully understood? Fashion has embraced computer technology, with online sales continuing to grow and fashion film increasingly being used to market creative designs. This presents an opportunity to redress the balance by using technology to educate and shape an alternative and sustainable future for the fashion design of traditional textiles. The UK and Chinese research - industry teams will establish and enhance a long-term collaboration to discuss the challenges and threats to creative fashion and textiles and ideas on how immersive experience and techniques could be used to represent and preserve the history and heritage of traditional fashion and textile products, and transfer them into modern-style design to meet the current and future fashion trends will be explored in facilitated workshops designed to determine how developments in AR, VR and MR and can provide opportunities to capture, develop, disseminate and promote provenance, heritage, craftsmanship and the value of slow fashion and textile products in contemporary society.

The project aims to determine how immersive interactions can be used to communicate the experience and value of creative, artisan fashion and textile products, with a focus on culture, provenance, heritage, the human hand and sustainable clothing consumption. The novelty of this research lies in the interdisciplinary approach and UK-China cross-cultural knowledge exchange employed across fashion and textiles and computing science with both industry and academia. The focus of the research will be within two key project themes: 1) cultural heritage preservation in fashion and textiles towards revaluing craftsmanship; 2) people and planet preservation towards sustainable methods of design, production, consumption and disposal of fashion and textile products. Fashion and textiles has embraced computer technology, with online sales and fashion film increasingly being used to market creative designs. However digital technologies within this sector have been used primarily to drive consumer demand for fast fashion, often involving narratives and experiences around performance and spectacle for pushing sales. This research project investigates the opportunities that technology offers to redress the balance by using digital methods to inform and shape an alternative and sustainable future for the international fashion and textile industry based on different economic and societal models. There is now a new agenda for digital innovations focusing on an authentic and meaningful application that is far more relevant to today's complex world which focuses on sustainability, provenance and the inherent value of human processes that reconnect people and products in an empathetic and deeper way. The pressure to move towards a more sustainable global fashion and textile industry is now paramount where traditional methods of textile and clothing manufacture, using natural renewable sources that are inherently long-lasting offer a 'slow' fashion alternative.