IN-PERSON Manchester Livable Cities
Abstract
Portmeirion, the architectural landmark in North Wales, reaches its centenary in 2026, offering context for reconsidering how culturally significant places are documented, interpreted and accessed through immersive media. As a site shaped by tourism, architectural identity, and forms of selective physical access, it provides a case through which to examine the social and technical implications of immersive heritage. This paper explores a digital heritage project that seeks to transform drone-captured survey data of Portmeirion into a virtual reality experience. It argues that the key challenge in immersive heritage is no longer capture alone, but access: who gets to experience heritage sites, under what conditions, and through which forms of mediation. While technical issues such as large datasets, specialist workflows, and hardware demands remain important, they also have wider cultural consequences, limiting how heritage can be shared, interpreted, and encountered by more diverse audiences. The paper examines whether alternative scene representations, particularly Gaussian Splatting, may provide a more accessible route to immersive heritage visualisation than conventional mesh-only pipelines. Accessibility is considered across computational, production, institutional, and public dimensions, with particular attention to how immersive heritage might support wider engagement for remote visitors, older audiences, disabled users, and others less able to experience the site directly. By reframing immersive heritage from a problem of capture to one of access, the paper connects digital representation to wider debates on inclusion, cultural tourism, and the unequal experience of place in the digital age.
Hannah Thatcher is an architect and Lecturer in Architecture at the University of Salford. Her work explores the relationship between architecture and digital technologies, with particular attention to how these tools are reshaping design processes, communication, and immersive experience. Before entering academia, she spent ten years in architectural practice, where she undertook practice-based research into BIM implementation, visualisation and evolving modes of architectural production. She has also worked as a consultant on virtual reality game environments for commercial games studios.
Dr. Ian W. Owen is an architect, researcher and lecturer in Architecture at the University of Salford, where he is Programme Director of the Master of Architecture (M.Arch). His research focuses on post-war architectural heritage, post-war industrial design and architecture pedagogy. His work examines questions of preservation, interpretation, representation and the evolving conditions of architectural education, while also engaging semiotics and visual analysis through particular expertise in Roland Barthes, mythology, and the cultural reading of images and objects. Working across qualitative and quantitative modes of inquiry, he explores how architecture and design are critically understood, historically situated, and pedagogically framed within contemporary cultural and technological contexts. He serves as an Architectural Archives Advisory Panellist for Wales, is a member of the Editorial Advisory Group for Touchstone, the annual journal of the Royal Society of Architects in Wales, and is a Contributing Editor for Architecture, Media, Politics, Society (AMPS). His latest book is Histories of Housing: From Historical Foundations to Modern Challenges.
1:30 pm - 3:00 pm
Friday 19th June, 2026