Lichfield Time Travellers
Client: Lichfield District Council
Partners: Four Door Productions, TGANorth, TGAC,
Local Partners: Visit Lichfield tour guides, Lichfield Garrick Theatre, Lichfield Cathedral, Samuel Johnson Birthplace Museum, Erasmus Darwin house Museum
You can download the app for free on iOs and Android devices by using the links below:
Start
Lichfield District Council secured some Welcome Back Funding to create a new experience that would, firstly, invite visitors and residents back to the explore the historic City of Lichfield, and, secondly, “bring the history of this place and its people to life...”.
Lichfield Time Travellers is a large-scale, location-based, interactive augmented reality tour experience that brings history to life in the streets of historic Lichfield City.
To do this we developed the core narrative and stories working with local knowledge experts, and use live mapping and geo-location, gamification, and brand-new volumetric video technology (5x cameras) to capture character performances in full 3D.
Journey
Initially, we worked with local partners on the ground in Lichfield to explore the city and unpack its history and heritage - the stories of this place and the people who live, work, and visit here - past, present, and future.
With such amazing stories to tell, from the invention of the first English Dictionary, to the plight of people burned at the stake, to those exploring the forefront of science and philosophy, we decided that Lichfield Time Travellers needed to celebrate people and their stories.
Building on the fantastic experience we created at Tamworth Castle - Tamworth Castle AR Explorer - we took the volumetric video approach to the next level.
For Lichfield, we used the advanced 5x camera + sensor set up, rather than the single camera + sensor set up we had used in Tamworth.
This creates a full 3D capture of the actors performing as characters form Lichfield’s history, which enabled us to create the effect of a ‘real person’ being pulled through time into the modern world.
As the characters appear through the geo-located Augmented Reality Time Portals, the audience can actually walk all the way around them, as if they were there in person, and even have their photos taken alongside them.
This is in contrast to the single camera + sensor set up we used at Tamworth that gave us about a 90° capture of the actors, from the front, which was perfect for creating the desired ghostly effect of the characters in the Castle environment.
We are all quite familiar with 3D scans of spaces and objects, but this technology gives us the power to capture live human performances in full 3D // 360° and transform them, effectively, into highly versatile 3D video objects, that can be enhanced with audio and visual effects, and placed back into the real world for audiences to encounter and interact with using their smartphones, as well as for virtual reality environments.
Ralph Berenguel as Francis Barber
Destination
Lichfield Time Travellers - A new large-scale, location-based, interactive Augmented Reality app platform and Tour experience through the City of Lichfield:
Brings history to life on the streets for new audiences, especially younger adults, and families with children.
Insights
The ‘traditional’ heritage offer in Lichfield is very strong and ‘traditional’ heritage audiences are very well catered for – the goal of this project was to use novel interactive and location-based storytelling to broaden the city’s heritage offer, and to extend its potential to engage new and younger audiences, including visitors and families, as well as Lichfield residents.
Volumetric video // motion capture is a brand-new technology and it’s evolving fast. It is used quite commonly in film making, but this project effectively moves the experience away from a screen-based one and places this new form of 3D media (the 3D video object) back into the world. The potential of this technology to enhance heritage engagement, accessibility, and performing arts more widely, is immense and will only grow as these technologies become more stable and user friendly.
This project was rapid. From start to finish, we completed this Lichfield Time Travellers in just four months. What’s making this possible it optimising our approach, refining and building on the learnings of previous similar projects, and working closely with local partners on the ground wherever possible to get the best information and to source local actors to be our cast of characters.
What’s Next?
We are looking at the future of interactive and immersive storytelling.
At Tamworth, we used a wide variety of 3D media to bring the stories of the Castle and its characters to life.
Here, we a site-specific approach to stitch the 3D media into the historical environment - i.e. a character appears through a specific doorway, or a timeline appears like writing on a wall, etc.
In Lichfield, we used an enhanced volumetric video set up and a location-based approach to enable content to appear in the streets and refer to the historic environment - i.e. character appear to know where they are thanks to the scripting and performances.
In future, we want to bring the key aspects of these two projects together to deliver both the ‘variety’ of the experiences, and ‘site-specific’ nature of them, with the ability to place these storytelling experiences anywhere - on the streets, in a park, through a museum or heritage site, linked to pages in a book…the possibilities are endless…
To find out more about what interactive and immersive storytelling could do for you, or if you’re interested in exploring opportunities for collaboration, then we’d love to hear from you.
Jed Jaggard as the recruiting sergeant
Olivia Knops as Kitty Chambers