Immersive Storytelling.
Gazooky Studios
Rose has always told stories in unconventional and innovative ways. She is founder, CEO and Creative Director of Gazooky Studios, a company which aims to explore how storytelling techniques can be combined with cutting edge immersive technologies.
Gazooky produces immersive content applications, AR location-based projects, and immersive commissions across multiple sectors – eg. cultural heritage, health, smart cities, transport and tourism. Projects are broad in range, scope and imagination, including hybridised digital and physical interactions, digital-placemaking, immersive on-the-go GPS-triggered AR dramas leading audiences through outdoor spaces, or story-trail leading the audience through gamified interactive location-based narratives and dramatic events.
Gazooky Studios have developed a unique platform to democratise immersive digital storytelling, allowing anyone to make their own digital experiences and place them anywhere in the world. Think PokemonGo, without the need for developers. The platform, called 6DPixie, is as easy to use as sending an email.
This platform has been used to create characters in a museum, leading visitors through exhibits, on train stations to lead people through complex journeys, and in the tourist industry.
Projects include an AR story-game trail for Smart Cities 2021: UK Foreign Office/DIT-funded, in collaboration with PwC. BursAR is an unique AR story-game app, a visitor discovery tool for the Turkish city of Bursa, leading tourists through AR ‘stops’ which bring the heritage of the city to life with augmented reality 3D objects, of images and sounds.
Working within any sector, Gazooky fuses ground-breaking mixed reality technology with theatre, games, cinematic art and experience-design. VR, AR, MR, XR, spatial sound – using a range of technologies, playing with emerging immersive science to engage audiences.
We have done extensive R&D to make our technology really take storytelling to a new level. that’s why we have been funded by European Space Agency for 5 years, researching with space scientists, into ways in which space tech can enhance our work.
Gazooky also specialises in AR solutions to support people with disabilities such as ChapARone, a web-based tool, which helps people with additional needs navigate train journeys, with the help of AR characters.
We’ve made digital twins of Smart green Shippings zero-emisssion innovative FastRigs and created an app which allows viewers to walk onto the deck of one of the amazing inventions to see how they work.
Visual/aural media, combined with gamified storytelling, can lead users through previously unexplored physical spaces, whether urban, rural, in need of regeneration, or under-used parts of the community. They can enhance the experience for audiences in new ways, taking them through virtual portals to mysterious worlds, where they’ll meet interactive characters, be immersed in soundscapes, find clues, and in-game currency, or solve complex story problems.
And ultimately we aim to take this new form of storytelling into realms which will allow a new kind of empathy, levels of understanding between each other, today and in the past, which will transform the way we interact in our communal spaces.
Rose gives talks and demonstrations all over the world, to evangelise about the postive applications of immersive technlogy in our lives, and especially in our culture and entertainment. And she also talks about the pitfalls and concerns we need to address when we embrace new technology.
Panel discussion for the launch of Manchester Met University’s School of Digital Art
Rose is a mentor for Creative England, advising new writers, film-makers and immersive enthusiasts, as well as delivering workshops to share ways to explore innovation.
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