The Industrial PhD project “Sculpting in Time and Space” is a collaboration between MAKROPOL, Aalborg University's Multisensory Experience Lab, and the National Film School of Denmark. The project is supported by Innovation Fund Denmark and Nordisk Film Fonden.

Professor Stefania Serafin, Head of the ME-Lab, will act as the university supervisor. Mads Damsbo, CEO of MAKROPOL, will act as the company supervisor. Third party supervisor is Søren Friis Møller, Head of Studies of the National Film School of Denmark. The PhD student, Camilla Jaller, holds a B.A. in Comparative Literature from University of Copenhagen from 2015 and a Master of Arts in Visual Culture also from University of Copenhagen, 2017.

The aim of the PhD project is to map and analyse how the current use of immersive technologies in cinematic experiences is expanding the possibilities of traditional cinema and to develop methodologies for venue-specific implementation of the identified links between immersive technologies and cinematic embodied storytelling.

The project claims that if we can identify these expansions and venue-responsive links, then we can facilitate the development of novel venue concepts to function as outlets for current and future XR Cinema experiences. The PhD project has as its success criteria that the direct implementation of the research's methodology will help MAKROPOL or a similar XR production company in prototyping a concept for the very first XR Cinema in Europe. The opening of XR Cinema venues will lead to a general growth of the market by establishing novel business and distribution models for existing and future XR Cinema content productions. This way, the research will partake in changing the current situation from a variety of singular, large-scale, and content-driven XR experiments into a unified XR Cinema ecosystem.