View the full experience

While the project is no longer supported, you can still watch a video of the full Sir Gawain and the Green Knight XR experience.

View the presentation

Scroll through the presentation given on the day using the arrows underneath.

Dee Chainey-Jones speaking at the 'Spirits of Place Symposium', Williamson Art Gallery and Museum, Wirral, UK (12 October, 2024). © Tim Shewan

Dee Dee Chainey at a podium on stage in front of a crowd, with a screen reading: Immersive heritage: Bringing folklore to life through XR.

The project

Dee Chainey-Jones presented the 'Sir Gawain and the Green Knight' XR experience at the Spirits of Place Symposium, Williamson Art Gallery and Museum, Wirral, UK (12 October, 2024).

The browser-based, mobile-first experience was developed as an experimental test case for leveraging XR with AI tools for improved engagement and understanding in cultural heritage storytelling projects.

The project had two aims:

Firstly, to transform a lengthy and complex medieval poem into an accessible format for museum symposium attendees.
Secondly, to immerse attendees in the Wirral landscape without leaving the museum, as the landscape was central to the 'spirits of place' symposium theme.

Solution:

A 17-minute animated journey through the themes of the poem. The rising and falling action and resolution of the narrative's key scenes were depicted as AI-generated character-led soliloquies to outline events. Each scene ended with the character asking key theme-related questions of the user to engage them with the poem's meaning and give them time to reflect and respond in a personal way. Skyboxes replicated Wirral landscapes and imagined scenes from the poem, creating a sense of place. These provided users with both 'a window into the past' and 'a window through the museum’s walls' into the wider Wirral landscape, reinforcing an immersive narrative of place. As users move their phone around the story space, the landscape shifts dynamically, offering an interactive snapshot of Wirral’s past by leveraging the phone's gyroscope and accelerometer.

Challenges:

The project raised questions about ethical engagement, access to emerging tech, storytelling versions of the past, ‘accurate’ folklore and heritage representation and the visibility of women in history, myth, legend and folklore. Tech questions included ethical uses of AI, and the limitations of AI tools currently on the market.

Results:

Users rated their understanding of the poem’s themes on a scale of 1-10 before and after the experience, with results showing a measurable increase.

Project contributors:

Dee Chainey-Jones (project lead; UX and narrative design; asset generation leveraging AI tools) and Cyrus Chainey (developer).

Tools and technologies:

Design: ChatGPT for narrative design; Microsoft Co-pilot and Skybox AI for image generation; 11ElevenLabs Voice Changer for audio; Live Portrait AI for animation and video generation.

Development: A-Frame VR framework. AWS for hosting and cloud storage.