Listen / Do / Play - A Practical Day for Immersive Makers

A one-day practice exchange for people actively building immersive experiences across the North (and beyond).

Listen / Do / Play is built for working reality - prototypes, pipelines, touring challenges, audience flow, technical constraints, production fixes.

This is not a talk-heavy event. The centre of gravity is practical:

• demos you can try
• workshops you take part in
• structured encounters that turn “nice to meet you” into real follow-up

What you’ll leave with

• practical methods you can reuse (workshop outputs, templates, checklists)
• direct connections with people who can actually help (not random networking)
• clear next steps - who to follow up with, and why

Who it’s for

• studios, start-ups and independent practitioners working in immersive experience
• researchers looking to connect practice beyond the university
• creative technologists and digital practitioners
• venues and cultural organisations developing interactive, spatial or immersive work

If you design, produce, test, install or deploy immersive experiences, you belong here.

Come ready to contribute one thing - a demo, a useful lesson, a question you want help with, or an introduction you can make.

Date, time, location

Thursday 19 March 2026

HOST, MediaCity (Salford) - 6th Floor (and 4th Floor)

Doors: 09:30 (coffee)
Core programme: 10:00 - 17:00
Drinks: from 17:00

Tickets: Free but ticketed

What happens on the day

Demos all day

Hands-on demos run throughout the day so people can actually try tools, prototypes, and systems. Demos can range from early experiments to deployed work, but the emphasis is on what’s real and what it takes to make things function outside a lab.

Workshops (4 total)

Four workshops, each 1 hour, with breaks between. Two run in the morning and two in the afternoon. Workshops are active - doing rather than listening - and focused on production realities.

Case studies running all day

A rolling programme of short videos and case study content runs throughout the day. While workshops are on, the cinema continues playing - a parallel way to absorb projects and approaches without adding more live talks.

Useful Encounters (networking that doesn’t waste your day)

Built-in structures that make the right people find each other quickly, without turning networking into another session.

Workshop sessions

Decode - Pivoting Towards Innovative Technology

A practical session for creatives who want to understand the creative tech landscape and translate it into next steps they can actually act on.

Audience: creatives and producers who want to pivot, or want a clearer handle on creative tech.

The Future of Immersive Innovation

A grounded look at what’s working across venues, festivals, museums, theatres, sports and entertainment spaces - then group discussion to turn patterns into practical principles.

Audience: immersive producers, creatives, freelancers, venues, researchers.

Steal Like a Pro - Innovative Techniques for Expanding Audiences and Business Aims

Innovation isn’t just technology - it’s also how you grow, partner, sell, and survive. This workshop uses cross-industry transfers to generate tactics you can test in the next month.

Audience: Northern immersive companies and practitioners who want positive shifts in how they generate work.

Give the North a Voice - Local Issues for Immersive Companies in Greater Manchester

An action-focused workshop to surface the real blockers (funding, visibility, routes to market, touring, skills, procurement) and turn them into tangible next steps we can take forward.

Audience: Northern immersive arts producers, freelancers and companies.

Demos - what we want (and what we don’t)

• What we want: working builds, tools, prototypes, systems, and tests people can try.
• What we do not want: sales booths or hard pitches.

Listen to what’s real. Do what’s practical. Play with what’s next.

Listen / Do / Play is produced by MediaCity Immersive Technologies Innovation Hub (MITIH) - a Greater Manchester-based programme supporting immersive and creative technology across R&D, production, skills, and industry connection. This event is part of MITIH’s work to bring practitioners together around practical exchange, real-world testing, and collaborations that continue beyond the day.