About Hidden Kingdoms
Hidden Kingdoms is a travel companion app for people who experience travel anxiety. Take the app on your journey where you will experience check-ins along the way, and unlock creatures when you’ve reached key milestones!
For moments when you feel overwhelmed, our pocket travel companion will provide meditations and soundscapes to help you Arrive Calm at your destination.
Download now:
The Project
Hidden Kingdoms was born from an observation of real life experiences. Within the BOM team and across our visitors, there has always been a high number of neurodivergent people. As a result, we could see first hand how difficult and overwhelming the journeys can be to reach cultural venues, whether this was as a visitor or as their place of work.
The team saw a genuine need for a tool to help independent travel and we were able to access Innovate UK funds to support the idea. With essential funding in place, we developed the app in our Immersive Studio and we worked closely with neurodivergent artists and experts to create the content.
We hope to develop the app further and continue to support people through digital and immersive experiences.
About BOM
BOM (Birmingham Open Media) is an immersive arts organisation, empowering communities through innovation with immersive technology and inclusive learning programmes.
We are a non-profit social enterprise, creating award-winning immersive experiences using virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR) with a strong social purpose. Our experience covers everything from app and games development, providing high level immersive consultancy, skills training, building VR worlds and creating interactive AR experiences.
Learning and inclusion is important to us and we deliver education and outreach to over 1,500 underserved children, young people and adults each year, particularly those who face economic barriers or disabilities.
Hidden Kingdoms Contributors
Hidden Kingdoms was created by our in house dev team at BOM with some amazing contributions from the following:
Harmeet Chagger-Khan
Harmeet Chagger-Khan (she/her) is Creative Director of Surfing Light Beams creating immersive experiences and playable adventures applying research with new technology, across stories and games placing communities and people at the heart of the process. Harmeet also leads organisations and companies on their immersive and emerging tech projects and strategy in both an Exec Producing and Consultancy capacity.
Joe Wright
Joe (he/him) is a Cardiff-based musician and creative technologist, interested in collaborative music production and interaction design. As a performer, Joe has performed extensively in Jazz and improvising ensembles, with musicians like Rob Luft, Corrie Dick and James L Malone. His technology work encompasses sound-design, instrument design and interactive systems, including projects with Drake Music, Oily Cart, and BCMG.
Edie Murray
Edie Jo Murray (they/them) is a UK-based artist with a desire to disrupt what you understand as reality. Edie invites audiences into imagined worlds where the rules are different and weird is welcome. They create work that overtly embraces the eclectic and anachronistic: references to ancient myth and folklore mingling curiously with 90s TV nostalgia and futuristic digitally rendered environments. With digital tools and immersive technologies at its core, Edie’s practice is enriched through vibrant, sensory-driven exploration of physical media.
Pasannamati Neal
Pasannamati (she/her) is an ordained Buddhist and a specialist teacher/psychologist, working in the field of neurodiversity and supporting schools around improving inclusivity. A meditator for 25 years, she teaches mindfulness and compassion meditation to both children and adults, as well as leading Buddhist retreats and study within her local community.