DAE's Trans Realities Lab Awarded €650,000 by the European Union

Over the next 36 months, TRL will investigate a question that is becoming increasingly urgent for European cultural policy: what are the long-term social and cultural impacts when citizens spend significant parts of their lives in virtual and persistent digital worlds?

DAE is one of nine partners working on this project under the coordination of Aalto University, Finland. With a total budget of €3.5M, VOPUS will use opera, one of Europe’s most historically embedded and craft-intensive art forms, as its research lens, studying how virtualising participation and production affects social cohesion, well-being and cultural identity across communities. The project also asks what virtual worlds can offer the cultural sector in more practical terms: how institutions whose reach has historically been constrained by geography and the economics of live production can find new audiences, and what that expansion means for the long-term resilience of European cultural heritage.

DAE will lead the technical and visual design, development and operation of the project’s central persistent virtual world environment. This environment will be built on open, interoperable Web 4.0 standards. Designed from the outset to avoid vendor lock-in, the environment will be transferable across European cultural insitutions. Three escalating pilot productions will target large numbers of regular users whose engagement also supports the project’s Social Sciences and Humanities research objectives.

“VOPUS is the natural next step in a trajectory we have been building for several years,” said Dr Ian Biscoe, Professor of Transdisciplinary Design Networks at DAE and Founder of the TRL, which is located at High Tech Campus, Eindhoven. Furthermore, it continues DAE’s commitment to supporting European-led, open-standards-based approaches to building a better world – virtual or otherwise.