University of Birmingham researchers are pioneering the use of virtual and augmented reality to help us explore the past.
What would it be like to travel back in time and experience history for ourselves? It’s a question that’s been asked endlessly in the realm of science fiction. From A Christmas Carol to Back to the Future, the idea of reliving history has been a mainstay of modern popular culture.
While the possibility of real time travel remains doubtful, researchers from our History and English Literature departments are using the latest technology to create virtual experiences that can immerse us in the past.
Mined since the Bronze Age, Alderley Edge in North-East Cheshire is rich in history and home to a mysterious local legend concerning an ancient hero, his underground army, and a vigilant White Wizard. The Invisible Worlds project has created an Augmented Reality app to bring the Legend of Alderley to life, allowing visitors to explore the Edge using their smartphones or tablets. The app shares and collects new versions of the legend, presented alongside curated soundscapes, visions of wizards and white horses, and glimpses into the site’s hidden network of mines.
Invisible Worlds is a unique blend of local storytelling, placemaking and interactivity, giving an immersive platform for people to digitally engage with otherwise intangible histories.
The project was devised by Dr Victoria Flood in the Department of English Literature. Flood wanted to find an innovative way to help visitors learn more about local legendary narratives at open-air heritage sites, and to encourage them to share their own creative re-imaginings. Thanks to a partnership with the National Trust, and funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, Alderley Edge became the perfect test-case for this augmented reality experience.
Commenting on the Invisible Worlds app, Dr Flood said: “The app has been designed to offer visitors to Alderley Edge a new way to experience its rich, legendary history, which has shaped human relationships to the site for at least three centuries, and is rooted in regional narratives which are even older still. Invisible Worlds is a unique blend of local storytelling, placemaking and interactivity, giving an immersive platform for people to digitally engage with otherwise intangible histories.”
The Invisible Worlds app guides users through a journey of digital historical discovery.
In April 2025, a new version of the Invisible Worlds app will launch. It will share further information on the environmental history of Alderley Edge, and help raise awareness of the ecological importance of safeguarding these sites and their historical importance. Speaking about the new iteration of the app, Dr Flood said: “We are looking forward to exploring the ways in which the app might be used to encourage visitors to help to protect and conserve this truly magical landscape”.
England’s ‘middling people’, neither the very poor nor the very rich, in 1560-1660 are the focus of Middling Culture. The research project aims to understand how reading, writing, and material culture fit into their everyday lives.
To best present their findings to their target audience of 11-14 year-olds, the team of researchers including Dr Tara Hamling, Reader in Early Modern Studies and Head of the Department of History, sought to create a digital recreation of a 1620s parlour room that could be fully explorable and interactive.
The photo-realistic recreation of the parlour room transports you back in time to the 1500s.
Through research into period-accurate spaces, furnishings and objects, the group was able to put together all the ingredients for an authentic period room. They then collaborated with a digital heritage design company, ArtasMedia, who took their plans and turned them into a digital reality.
it is a way of presenting new research that is interactive and discovery-led, allowing users to experience spaces, artifacts, and stories from the past in vivid first-person perspective.
The end product is an immersive and emotive interactive game that puts its users in the shoes of four characters from the middling ranks of society in the 1620s, allowing them to interact with the objects and activities that would have occupied their time spent at home. Through this experience, we can see how the creativity of influential ‘middling’ people of this time, including the likes of Shakespeare, was shaped by their immediate material environment.
Dr Hamling explained their decision to create the virtual parlour by saying: "There are huge advantages and opportunities with a 'virtual' period room compared to exhibits in traditional museums; it is a way of presenting new research that is interactive and discovery-led, allowing users to experience spaces, artefacts and stories from the past in vivid first-person perspective."
Each of the game's four characters react to their environment in unique ways.
When interacting with an object, the user hears the thoughts of the different characters, giving them a deeper understanding of each person’s identity and the relationship they would have had with items in the room.
With the characters and thoughts developed by creative writers and performed by actors, Middling Culture furthers a long history of interdisciplinarity between our Department of History and the creative sector.
Looking forward, the Middling Culture research group aims to promote the digital outputs of the project for use in schools as well as producing a VR experience at the Weald & Downland Living Museum, where the original seventeenth-century room can be found.
For Dr Megan Cavell, Associate Professor in the Department of English Literature, an immersive experience was the perfect way for the public to explore her research into Old English and Latin riddles.
Developed in partnership with the National Trust at Sutton Hoo, escape game designer Sacha Coward and co-investigator Dr Jennifer Neville, Riddlequest has its players on a mission to return an object, formerly belonging to King Rædelwulf, to its rightful place. Players have to complete challenges that guide them through the experience, including solving real early-medieval riddles.
Riddlequest players are taken on a quest across the Sutton Hoo site.
Through the riddles selected for the game and its interactive nature, Dr Cavell wanted people to experience first hand the diversity of riddles from the 7thcentury. Challenging the bleak and violent perception of that era, Riddlequest demonstrates that there was a vibrant literary culture that existed throughout the period.
For Dr Cavell, Riddlequest is just the beginning: "Riddlequest is all about bringing the rich and varied collections of riddles — texts that were always meant to be played with and solved — to wider audiences. My colleagues and I look forward to working on other creative projects with riddles, a genre of early medieval literature that encapsulates the high and low, funny and heartfelt, and everything in between."
Senior Lecturer in Medieval and Early Modern Literature
Biographical and contact information for Dr Victoria Flood, Senior Lecturer in Medieval and Early Modern Literature in the Department of English Literature at the University of Birmingham.
Reader in Early Modern Studies
Biographical and contact information for Dr Tara Hamling, Reader in Early Modern Studies, Department of History, University of Birmingham.
Associate Professor
Biographical and contact information for Dr Megan Cavell, Senior Lecturer in the Department of English Literature at the University of Birmingham.
