Virtual Realities as Time Travel: hybrid workshop

The Virtual Reality Oracle project is proud to present an international, multidisciplinary workshop on Virtual Realities as Time Travel at the University of Bristol (UK) and online on Friday 12 May 2023, 09:30-17:00.

Virtual Realities as Time Travel will bring together speakers from the project team and from across academic disciplines and industry to explore how users and producers of both VR experiences and historical video games conceive of journeying to the past.

This event has been organised by Richard Cole, Research Associate in Ancient Greek History and Virtual Reality at the University of Bristol, in collaboration with Chris Bevan, Elisa Brann, Crescent Jicol and Emilia Tor. The workshop is sponsored by the Bristol Digital Game Lab and the Centre for Creative Technologies at the University of Bristol.

Full programme

09:30-10:00 Virtual Realities as Time Travel

• Esther Eidinow (Bristol): The Virtual Reality Oracle: An Adventure in Time Travel
• Richard Cole (Bristol): Virtual Antiquity: “The closest thing to a time machine that lets you experience ancient Greece”

10:00-11:20 Playing with Time

• Alexander Vandewalle (Antwerp/Ghent): Time Travel, or Time Tourism? Challenges for Studying the Experience of Historical Video Games
• Bettina Bodi (Leeds Becket): Temporal-Ergodic Agency in Videogames

11:20-11:40 Break

11:40-13:00 Facilitating Time Travel

• Robert Houghton (Winchester): “Against a darkening background”: Dark Age mechanics in Total War: Attila
• Kate Cook (St Andrews): Time Travel on your phone? Mobile games, time, and history

13:00-14:00 Lunch

14:00-15:20 Connecting Past and Present

• Jack Lowe (UWE): Time Travel as Wayfinding: Assembling Past and Present in Location-based Games
• Leyla Johnson (Mokawk Games): Toying with History

15:20-15:40 Break

15:40-17:00 Producing Historical Experiences

• Stéphanie-Anne Ruatta (Ubisoft): Creating the Virtual World of Assassin’s Creed Odyssey
• Dooley Murphy (Copenhagen): Hans Christian and I: Representing a Personality in Virtual Reality

17:00 Wrap up

The Virtual Reality Oracle (VRO) is a ground-breaking first-person virtual reality experience of divination at the ancient Greek oracle of Zeus at Dodona. The project team, from the universities of Bristol, Bath and Kings College, London, is led by Esther Eidinow  at the University of Bristol, and is funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AH/T004673/1). For more information, view the project website.