Emancipating XR (Extended Reality) is an speculative media archaeology project which aims to capture the possibilities and difficulties for Virtual Reality practitioners seeking to work with Open-Source technologies.

The project is led by Aiden Brady and Cailean Finn and has been funded by Immersive Arts UK's 'Experiment' strand.

Tied-in with this project is Aiden Brady's VR project "A Town Unravelled" which initially sought to creatively appropriate a VR headset for artistic purposes and use the accessible system information to impact a VR installation artwork. This artwork was presented in grassroots and alternative contexts, outside of traditional arts infrastructures, in Newry City, Northern Ireland.

After embarking on this project, it became clear that developing a coherent artwork for display in a non-gallery context and successfully developing open source methods to do so, would be a mammoth task. So, the project has been segmented for now and this website reflects partially on the individual artistic process for "A Town Unravelled" but to a much greater extent, begins to develop a non-linear research map of the type of methods being developed by open-source curious XR practitioners.

Throughout the site, there are references to the vast amount of material online in this area which was clearly once available but has since been deleted, or now leads to a dead link. One could only speculate why discussions of this nature are no longer available.

Please be kind while vandalising the site (❤️ ω ❤️)

Emancipating XR

Last Modified:

Fri Nov 28 16:12:14 2025