During the Covid-19 lockdown period in the second quarter of 2020, existing Audience of the Future Challenge award-holders continued to develop projects, albeit within the limits presented by lockdown.

The projects include Dinosaurs and Robots, a mixed reality experience led by Factory 42 and originally created for London’s Natural History Museum and Science Museum; Dream, a live, online performance set in a virtual midsummer forest by the Royal Shakespeare Company and partners; an augmented reality experience featuring Aardman Animations’ Wallace & Gromit; and WEAVR, an AI-driven, mixed reality platform that has launched a new version of its experimental platform, creating the world’s first online-only eSports tournaments.

In this Covid-19 video diary series, we capture the creativity and experience that each of the project teams went through in order to pivot their projects. They had to find new ways to work, adjust their projects around the obstacles presented, and not least, consider how their projects might work in a post-Covid world. To create the series, all of the demonstrator project teams were asked to record their progress as ‘video diaries’ explaining how they adjusted their projects to comply with Covid 19 restrictions. As part one of a three part series, the following video diaries are now published and can be viewed below:

Combined, the projects funded by the AotF challenge, represent the most advanced set of public trials of Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Reality content anywhere in the world. Since the pandemic, the projects have been reimagined and redeveloped for audiences in the UK and internationally.

Stay tuned for more video diaries coming soon.