Explore the virtual world’s impact.
Play a leading role in a school internationally renowned for its applied and practice-based approach to Creative Technologies research.
Read on to find out more about Manchester Metropolitan University as the ideal academic home for your research.
For an informal discussion about research in Creative Technologies, please contact SODA Research and Innovation Lead, Professor Kirsty Fairclough.
Our research strengths
SODA’s research combines creative theories and practices with technological exploration to generate impactful, forward-thinking insights and projects in the digital arts.
We integrate disciplines such as games, digital media, interactive storytelling, and immersive technologies, fostering collaboration and innovation across a range of fields. That includes exploring new forms of narrative through virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and mixed reality (MR) technologies.
Researchers investigate how immersive experiences transform storytelling, gaming and audience engagement. Researchers focus on challenging current technological paradigms and imagining alternative digital futures by engaging with critical and speculative design methodologies to envision and prototype future technologies and digital experiences.
Research areas, initiatives and impact
We’re a global player in Creative Technologies, with particular expertise in the following areas:
- Speculative Technologies: This explores emergent, audience-facing technologies and their uses in the arts and education, often using speculative research methods to define, examine and imagine the affordances and ethical considerations of emerging technologies such as XR, AI, game engines and OBM in future storytelling.
- Media and Digital Culture: We develop new and divergent technology-based methods and creative cultures that better represent the global public’s needs and rights as subjects, co-creators, participants and audiences.
- Embodied audiences: We explore issues such as bias, trust and misinformation and how audiences (including people, bots, machine learning and artificial intelligence) might engage with such manifestations.
- Manchester Game Centre: Working on a local, national and international level, we look at the role of digital and analogue games in social change and focus on making games as a creative methodology.
Here are some examples of our impactful projects:
- DAFNE+: As part of an international consortium, we were awarded €4 million to create this decentralised media content platform for non-fungible token (NFT) artists.
- Sensorial Dreams: Hosted by the Royal Exchange Theatre, an immersive VR experience that combined cutting-edge technology with sensory exploration.
- Granny Jackson’s Dead: Our collaboration with Big Telly Theatre Company to understand what people think about issues, such as how grief technology can help us remember someone after they die and its real-world implications.
- Critical Acts: In collaboration with Abandon Normal Devices we created immersive gatherings and platforms for surveying emerging new and digital cultures through performance lectures through the tenets of Web3, virtual worlds, AI and much more.
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Every day we are creating real sustainability solutions for the future. It is exciting to see our work, which may have started in the lab, making real impact out in the world.
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Our reputation is built on inclusive and impactful research that engages with critical issues of our time and makes a positive contribution to culture, society and the economy.