Following our new resident competition launched earlier this year, we are delighted to welcome four fantastic new faces to the Pervasive Media Studio community.

Graduate and new talent residents:

Josh Barnes is a recent graduate in 3-D Design from the University Of Brighton. Josh's work explores the relationship between physical objects and Augmented Reality experiences. Specifically the research he carries out explores how to create intimate and playful peer-to-peer communication using AR technology.

Josh Barnes is now developing his 'Communication Quilt'. Originally designed to combat symptoms of loneliness experienced by children spending long stays in hospital, the Communication Quilt uses Augmented Reality [AR] technology to enable intimate communication with familiar textiles. By augmenting personal messages onto the illustrations that make up the quilt, it provides a playfully alternative platform for friends and family to share stories and communicate, utilising the inherently magical nature of AR technologies.

During his residency Josh will be looking to deeper investigate the nature of how children and adults interact with AR technology through user-testing different scenarios and user-experiences. He will also be looking to address ethical issues involved in a project of this nature by designing systems that bring families closer together through an object, in ways such as group customisation and the shared viewing of messages communally.

If you’d like to find our more about Josh’s work, he is giving a lunchtime talk: Mixing Medium Meaning here on Friday 22 November.

Silas Adekunle is a robotics student at UWE and founder of Reach Robotics. Reach Robotics is an entertainment robotics startup company with an ambitious goal: to use robotics to revolutionise gaming and to dynamically link physical and digital modes of play.
Silas is developing a range of toy robots that are controlled and developed using a companion app, allowing players to ‘level up’ their creatures through continuous play and by battling opponents in the real world.  

Silas gave a lunchtime talk here at the Studio on 6 November and you can find out all about it on our blog.

Start up residents:

ANAGRAM formed as a collaboration between May Abdalla and Amy Rose, both experienced documentary filmmakers with a strong interest for gaming, online and real world.

Together they develop and produce experiential documentary performance and site-specific works with the aim of bringing true stories off the screen and into new spaces. They will be integrating new technologies to make their interventions as invisible as possible. There is nothing they like more than a good surprise.

May and Amy have been making award-winning observational documentaries for UK broadcast and festival release since 2005. Between them their work has taken them from the front lines of the Egyptian revolution, to the intimate spaces of women dealing with severe postnatal breakdown. They have considerable experience in accessing people in sensitive situations and collaborate with their characters to express their stories with emotional depth and a playful lightness of touch. Their films have been screened at over 25 international film festivals worldwide.

Amy and May are planning to giving a lunchtime talk about their work on 6 December. Keep an eye on pmstudio.co.uk/events - more details coming soon.