By situating itself within maker culture, the project emphasizes hands-on creation, collaboration, and the iterative exploration of ideas. It values the process of making as a form of inquiry, where playful experimentation with materials and technologies fosters both learning and the generation of novel hybrid media works.

This project recognizes play as a fundamental aspect of learning and innovation. Through critical making practices, playful interactions serve as both a research method and an outcome. The methodology embraces experimentation, allowing for unexpected discoveries and iterative development through hands-on engagement with materials and technology.

This approach reflects the core of maker culture, where curiosity, creativity, and hands-on experimentation drive both learning and meaningful creation

Maker culture foregrounds hands-on experimentation, collaboration, and learning through doing, positioning the act of making as both a method and a form of inquiry. Within the design field, it encourages iterative processes, playful exploration, and the integration of diverse materials and technologies, enabling designers to test ideas in real time. By adopting maker practices, designers can bridge historical and contemporary approaches, reimagining traditional techniques through digital and interactive media to produce innovative, hybrid works that engage audiences in new ways.

Design practices increasingly explore the intersections of media, technology, and interactivity, finding new ways to engage audiences through immersive, participatory experiences. This research examines how historical visual techniques, such as optical illusions, pre-cinematic apparatuses, and early filmic methods, alongside early interactive interfaces and games, can be reimagined with contemporary gaming and data technologies to create novel hybrid media.

By fusing the material and perceptual qualities of historical media with the immersive, procedural, and interactive capacities of digital design, the project investigates how designers might prototype innovative hybrid experiences that challenge conventional distinctions between analogue and digital practice. From optical toys and mechanical amusements to early video games and digital engines, both gaming and cinema share roots in illusion, motion, and immersive spectatorship.

By looking back at these shared histories, the project explores how designers can bring together the visual, temporal, and interactive qualities of both cinema and gaming to create new kinds of hybrid media experiences, by revisiting where gaming and cinema first started to overlap, this project plays with how their visual rhythm and interactivity can be combined in new, experimental ways.