Future use cases

Our main aim is to foster the widest possible participation in digital research and innovation. We do this by creating a space for the kind of collaborative, interdisciplinary problem-solving that can address challenges associated with technical innovation, social and cultural change, commercial models, sustainability, security, digital ethics, policy and legislation, and more. Hence the Reality Emulator is a place where STEM specialists can work alongside experts in the arts, social sciences, and humanities to explore digital futures and create new methodologies. The following are some areas of emerging interest:

Innovation and Creativity 

The Reality Emulator has the capacity to act as a testbed for innovation in telecommunication networks and user-centred approaches to technology design. For instance, from a gaming perspective, it could be used to create speculative world-building scenarios where issues of ethics might be tangibly explored. It could also be used for risk/security modelling at scale. This might involve researchers collaborating with telecoms providers to pool data. Security researchers might find themselves working with social scientists to pool their sociotechnical expertise in the interests of digital innovation. Other areas of interest might include: 

  • Emulating communication networks to study the bandwidth implications for real world users. 
  • Emulating virtual networks to explore the benefits of using a local facility vs cloud tech. 
  • Developing design support systems through user testing, simulating artefacts and environments to enable quicker prototyping. 
  • Enabling an open facility to upskill design through computational means and designing with inclusivity at the forefront. 

Exploring Digital Futures  

Virtual Reality and narrative storytelling could be used to explore the ethical implications and technological requirements of alternative futures, which could provide useful insights for:  

  • Climate science communication and related public policy development. 
  • Using machine learning to model urban heritage sustainability, enable remote/international collaboration to identify common heritage assets, and visualise immersive experiences based on large-scale mixed media archives.  
  • Participatory approaches to smart city development.  
  • Studying risk management in cybersecurity through interactive scenarios, simulations and immersive games.  
  • Studying the effects of the virtual workforce and assessing the ‘costs’ of virtual on city futures.  
  • Exploring the everyday effects of data, such as behavioural ad targeting, job/career prospects, and credit scores. 
  • Exploring public perceptions of AI technologies in everyday life.  
  • Community-oriented collaborations for modelling digital futures with (alternative) forms of capital accumulation.  

New Methodologies  

The process of innovation itself merits further study, which would benefit from the expertise of specialists in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences utilising the immersive capabilities of the Reality Emulator to systematically study attention and affective digital experiences. For instance, the Reality Emulator could be used in conjunction with other methods, where for example, body/tracking technologies could be used alongside qualitative methods to study the experience or effectiveness of immersive technologies in relation to their substantive field of research. Other areas of study might include: 

  • Creating an evidence base for understanding claims about VR as method for developing empathy in e.g. social care and collaborative team training.
  • Using VR to research the complexities of body perception.  
  • Exploring mixed physical and digital interactions as affective experience.  
  • Studying how technologies intervene on bodily senses (visual, haptics, etc.).  
  • Reproductive science, technologies and tissue, and developing interdisciplinary and interactive approaches to ‘making the body visible’.  
  • Enabling remote and/or collaborative visualisation and interaction with digital archives, models, objects and environments.  
  • Using VR for participatory and collaborative re-assemblage of heritage objects.
  • Developing collaborative, community-based strategies for engaging/exploring the politics of archives through digital technologies, VR and immersive experiences.