Developing immersive experience at Caistor Roman Town

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This project (a partnership between the University of Nottingham, Jam Creative Studios and the Norfolk Archaeological Trust) will use the site of the Roman town of Venta Icenorum (Norfolk) to develop and evaluate new methods of site interpretation through the use of an immersive virtual reality experience. As a Roman town that did not see subsequent development in the medieval and later periods, Venta Icenorum is one of the UK's most significant archaeological sites and has been the subject of a major programme of geophysical survey and excavation by the University of Nottingham since 2006. In common with many archaeological sites, there are few visible remains at Venta and the site has limited infrastructure for visitors. A new site interpretation scheme created by the applicants in 2015 used a 3D reconstruction of the site viewed using an app for Android and Apple mobile devices and containing an Augmented Reality (AR) element that allowed users to view the ancient town against the present landscape.The 2015 AR model was the latest iteration of a long history of visualisation at Venta that started with painted reconstructions and moved on to a series of 3D reconstructions. All of these, however, were passive encounters for the viewer presenting a single interpretation of the site. The new project will create a more dynamic immersive experience in which the visitor will use their mobile device to interact with characters and animals within the town and experience the town in different weather and seasons. In this pilot project, the visitor will take a route from the South Gate to the forum of the Roman town and will be guided by one of the town's Roman residents in animated form who will show them points of interest. Their progress will trigger a series of events and interactions with other characters and animals and the user will hear the ambient sounds and speech of a town in Roman Britain and will see the sunlit town of previous reconstructions transformed into a winter townscape of mud, snow and smoke. In order to achieve the new project will address a series of technical challenges relating to the use of location-based AR in a fairly featureless landscape with variable GPS coverage by combining existing locational techniques with new markerless AR technologies with the aim of piloting scalable and transferable methods for delivering immersive experiences within open landscapes It will also evaluate the issue of optimizing VR and AR experiences to operate and be sustainable in a world of rapidly developing rival platforms and for on-site and off-site use. Using fully immersive VR on the site itself remains impractical for safety reasons but the rapid rise in affordable fully immersive VR technologies for use at home and in education means that potentially costly VR/AR models need to envisage multiple applications. The project will also address the interpretative challenges raised by creating speech, dress and physical appearance for a population known only from archaeological evidence. A process of evaluation will rigorously evaluate audience responses to this new experience to inform its future development. Finally the project will further develop the existing partnership between the University of Nottingham, Jam Creative Studio (who are pioneering innovative approaches to heritage interpretation using new technologies) and the Norfolk Archaeological Trust (who own and manage a range of heritage sites across Norfolk).