In 2020, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, UAL’s Creative Computing Institute (CCI), Royal College of Music (RCM) and Imperial College London came together to merge disciplines for HEartS Professional, a collaborative research project funded by AHRC looking at how the pandemic affected the practice and the wellbeing of performers and artists of all disciplines.

As a research fellow on this project, my role involved researching how we could design technologies to support musicians in their creative musical practice. As part of this I did an investigation around training new purcussion musicians. This involved two full day workshops with diverse participants during which we understood some of the struggles being faced by institutions like the RCM and brainstormed how we could design technologies to address them.

As a result, I developed a prototype VR experience which was showcased at the RCM's annual Festival of Percussion, 2022. During the experience visitors were asked to put on a headset to land into a world, where they got to be a part of a five-person drumline performing with others as if they were in the room with them. The prototype experience was developed using 360 video and audio captured with the Insta 360 Pro camera as well as utilising the new Passthrough capabilities of the Oculus Quest.