AlterCare: A Worldbuilding Workshop with Beirut Art Centre

What happens when you treat an ecology, not as a backdrop, but as the engine of a world?

At Beirut Art Center, Play Office ran an XR workshop with artist and Resonate Alumni Lara Kobeissi, inviting participants to explore ecologies, worldbuilding, and emerging technologies as one connected creative practice.

The goal was not to learn software in isolation, it was to build a shared pipeline where lived environments, material traces, and embodied movement could become the foundations of immersive worlds.

Over the course of the workshop, participants developed speculative XR scenes by moving through a complete process, capturing reality, transforming it into 3D material, animating presence, and assembling worlds with intention.

We designed the technical approach to be hands-on and achievable without requiring specialist equipment, while still offering professional-grade processes that participants could take forward.

Participants used AI motion capture to generate animation from simple video recordings, turning everyday movement into animated 3D performance. This allowed rapid experimentation with character presence and storytelling, without the overhead of traditional motion capture systems.

We used photogrammetry to capture objects, surfaces, and fragments from the surrounding environment, bringing real textures and evidence into the digital space. Scans were not treated as decoration, they became anchors for narrative and atmosphere, and a way to preserve specificity.

By the end, the room was full of early-stage worlds, hybrid environments where scanned materials became landmarks, movement became narrative, and ecology operated as a design constraint rather than a theme.

More importantly, the workshop produced something durable,

• a shared technical vocabulary,

• peer-to-peer problem solving,

• and a repeatable workflow that participants can adapt to their own practice.

The emphasis was always on agency, not just using tools, but understanding how tools shape decisions, aesthetics, and imagination.

XR can easily drift toward spectacle. This workshop pushed in the opposite direction, toward situated worlds, grounded in material reality and collective authorship.

For us, the value of XR is not novelty, it is the ability to prototype environments, relationships, and futures.

This workshop was facilitated and funded by the British Council Lebanon, with sincere thanks to Marc Mouarkech for the support that made it possible.

And a huge thank you to Beirut Art Center for hosting, to Lara Kobeissi for co-leading with clarity and care, and to every participant for bringing curiosity, generosity, and bold experimentation into the room.