The Edinburgh International Festival brings audiences and artists together from all over the world.
Edinburgh International Festival is an unparalleled, city-wide, celebration of the performing arts across three weeks each August in Scotland’s capital.
Created in 1947 to celebrate the human spirit and bring people together through art, it is a global celebration of the finest performers and ensembles from the worlds of dance, opera, music and theatre. It also connects with local artists and communities through a range of programmes year-round.
The Challenge
Working with a variety of cultural venues in Edinburgh, it is imperative that the Edinburgh International Festival holds accurate and up to date information on the physicality of the venues it works with, to aid in planning and addressing the practical implications of fitting international productions in to spaces they were not originally designed for.
Currently the Festival operates with plan and section architect drawings, sharing 360-degree photographs of venues with visiting companies through a web portal. However, the performance industry is moving forward with production technology that allows advanced planning and programmable engineering to happen off site in virtual environments.
The Edinburgh International Festival’s challenge is to create virtual working spaces for venues in the city of Edinburgh that enable the Festival to stay at the forefront of technical innovation, providing the planning resources that world-class productions expect.
Finding a solution to this challenge would allow the Festival to easily share designs and collaborate with visiting companies, creating renders to explain staging set ups to those not used to working with technical drawings.
In addition, a solution could potentially allow the Festival to previsualise event spaces and enable off site programming for lighting and/or automated elements of visiting productions.
Applications for this Challenge Project have now closed. If you have any questions about Challenge Projects please contact the Creative Informatics team at creativeinformatics@ed.ac.uk.