Emancipating XR is a speculative media archaeology web project that documents and presents the challenges faced and work carried out by Virtual Reality practitioners seeking to push back against its closed source nature. Set in an apocalyptic digital junk yard, the work presents a web-garden littered with traces of online material referencing the attempts of various online communities in their attempt to understand, break, hack, and ultimately free their devices from its closed source roots.

The site can be experienced through a browser or a virtual reality device using OpenXR–which is an open-source and royalty free standard for interfacing with virtual reality and augmented reality devices. Visitors are free to explore the environment and discover lost objects and their various histories. Through acts of vandalism visitors can leave messages for others that pass by this open wasteland (please be kind 🖤) – https://xr.fioruil.ie/

The project was funded by Immersive Arts UK led by new media artist and writer Aiden Brady alongside creative technologist Cailean Finn.