Adam Corrie, an interdisciplinary creative technologist joins LIVE to share his journey and mission to democratise audio-visual education
Adam Corrie is an interdisciplinary creative technologist who has produced interactive, immersive exhibits and installations since 2005. His work has featured in hundreds of science museums, art galleries and visitor attractions across five continents. An accomplished technical communicator, Corrie has helped launch courses and delivered seminars to students, educators and researchers at schools and universities worldwide. He joins LIVE to share his audio-visual story and mission to make AV education accessible to all.
How did you get into the AV space?
I studied electronic engineering and computer science at university. I emerged as a maker and a programmer, but I didn’t necessarily want to follow one path or the other. I aimed to work with both disciplines and avoid being too confined at an early stage.
After university, I was fortunate enough to cross paths with a San Francisco-based AV integrator that specialised in spherical and hemispherical projection – often used for museums, cultural heritage projects, visitor attractions etc.
That took me all over the place, working on more than one hundred projects over the course of a decade in around 50 countries. Each project exposed me to more of the industry, as well as provided the opportunity to collaborate with people I enjoyed working with.
Eventually, I became more generally involved with AV and integration – looking at control systems, software and interactives and focusing on the human touch points of exhibits. This continued throughout my career, where I prioritised my time on working with people who inspired me.
At what stage did you first get involved with higher education?
Following that decade of work in industry, I had the chance to do some teaching at Central Saint Martins, a world-renowned art and design college, part of University of the Arts London (UAL). That was my first introduction to higher education.
After that, I worked more on cultural heritage projects – including for clients such as the National Trust and Wellcome Collection. Then, I returned to UAL full-time in a technical teaching role at London College of Communication (LCC) – where I got to work alongside lots of fantastic people. It was at LCC that I started to examine how technical teaching resources were developed – particularly in art and design.
In 2017, we seemed to be at a pivotal moment as students studying art and design disciplines arrived with rapidly evolving expectations of technology. A decade earlier, the expectation was that the university would provide them with a room full of computers, Microsoft Office, maybe Adobe Creative Suite – and that’s it. They might have brought their own laptops for basic tasks, but beyond that, there would not be a demand or expectation for complex technology and AV in their field of study.
That began to change; if you had a student enrolling in graphic design, for example, we could no longer assume their output medium to be solely print graphics – their work often became completely media agnostic. In responding to project briefs, they’d be using screens, projectors, audio – whatever equipment they might find in the studio.
So, not only had their expectations of technology changed because they wanted to embed it into their practice, but also because they had grown up with a different type of relationship with technology itself. They knew that computing and technology could be harnessed in weird and wonderful ways, and they didn’t necessarily need to be highly technically competent to access these technologies.
As an academic, you’re figuring out how to provide all of those opportunities to experiment and produce works of art without the students needing to become expert engineers or computer scientists. It was around this time when designing and building teaching resources for higher education was something I became passionate about.
What are some of your favourite AV projects you’ve worked on?
I’ve worked on a number of projects for Qualcomm alongside a great San Diego-based creative agency, but there’s one in particular that was quite interesting. They often wanted us to help them tell the story of a new piece of technology about to be launched.
They would look for a way to take sometimes very subtle technical specifications and tell a compelling story around them – because otherwise, they might be presenting just a slideshow of bullet points.
One of the significant projects we undertook with Qualcomm involved their latest generation of mobile 5G modems, specifically the launch of millimetre wave 5G technology. The devices used for testing and rapidly developing new chips overnight produced a wealth of debug data. We wanted to use that information to tell a story of performance. We built a dashboard in Unity that sifted through all that data, visualised and presented key metrics on screen. They used it at their annual Tech Summit – where the CEO stood in front of one of the widest screens I’ve seen – with our application running behind him, demonstrating the capability in a visually compelling way.
Another exciting project was the founding of the Creative Technology Lab at LCC. This began when I was teaching technical modules for undergraduate and postgraduate interaction design students. We had a little prototyping lab, where students from these courses could access electronic workbenches and kit. Most universities have a central loan store where students can borrow cameras, microphones and tripods.
But this was a specialised resource, where we loaned out things such as hardware for projection mapping or Arduino microcontrollers for connecting to sensors, motors or lights. We noticed a growing interest, which ties into my earlier point about the changing expectations of technology.
We put together a proposal to the deans and senior management that we needed a college-wide resource to meet this demand.
That’s how we launched the Creative Technology Lab, which focused on creative coding, physical computing – an umbrella term for electronics and microcontrollers – XR, gaming engines and libraries for machine learning or computer vision. Gradually, we integrated elements of AI, projection mapping and creative AV as a whole.
We received massive support from the college to do this and they invested heavily in the project. The lab tied in with the subsequent launch of several new, technically focused courses – such as user experience design and other programmes aimed at preparing students for specific industries like visual effects and virtual reality. Many of these courses hoped to produce students who graduate and go straight into the marketplace with the necessary skills right out of the box.
It was a highly collaborative effort from everyone involved; the feedback from students was encouraging and the increase in technical complexity in students’ work was remarkable. The Creative Technology Lab is still there today and is constantly evolving.

Has there been a project that was particularly challenging?
Sticking with the Creative Technology Lab, when it comes to higher education the biggest challenge is often funding. Though universities like to encourage innovation, there’s a lot of due diligence which must go into a sizable investment like that. Also – looking at the knock-on implications – it was in central London where real estate is in high demand, so allocating space for any resources comes at the expense of something else.
Staffing is an interesting challenge as well. As part of the investment, we were able to bring in several new technical instructors. If you look at disciplines like XR, practitioners with that expertise are scarce and in high demand. There are times where people with experience in more established technologies might be tempted to come out of the commercial sector and step into education for a while, where they get that teaching bug and want to share their knowledge and expertise – I know I certainly did!
But at that time, we were dealing with new and emerging technologies, resulting in a smaller pool of talent. Pair that with trying to compete against commercial salaries – which are typically higher than academic ones – finding the right mix of skills and balance of people with expertise, then being able to retain them within the organisation is difficult.
With the Creative Technology Lab, we were attempting to find new ways of exposing students to technically complex technologies they may have limited prior experience with. We wanted them to be able to learn and experiment. For example, in a screening room, they should be able to bypass the audio system and ingest content from their own devices, or take over the media layer for digital signage and LED walls within the building. You want them to be able to harness every piece of technology in the landscape.
What are your favourite AV tools?
The things which excite me the most relate to the projects that I have been working on in the last couple of years, which mostly involved large, immersive displays. The software and hardware for projection mapping 15 years ago was fairly rudimentary, with a large portion of it done using flaky software. There were some great tools, but they often had significant limitations.
In recent years, I have enjoyed the opportunity to work with the evolved descendants of those early tools, including media platforms such as D3 from Disguise as well as Pixera from AV Stumpfl, plus various 7thSense equipment. Having the chance to work with all these platforms and tools has been exciting; seeing their capabilities at pushing millions of pixels in a complex, immersive AV space has been amazing.
Those tools are constantly evolving and breaking new ground – for example, 7thSense working on Sphere in Las Vegas, driving its enormous LED surfaces. That ability to push hundreds of millions of pixels in real time from various sources – and helping creative agencies to develop the workflows needed to produce content for those complex surfaces – is a huge achievement.
Pixera was particularly useful when I worked on several projection mapping installations which dealt with a wide range of ultra high-resolution source media. It allowed us to configure complex, composite timelines with interactives, triggers and integrated show control. The frame-level accuracy, precise synchronisation, camera-based warp and blend, as well as colour matching offered by Pixera were simply incredible.
Where Disguise sits in terms of XR and virtual production (VP) makes them a great partner to have in your corner. I have worked with them on projects both in academia and the private sector; the capabilities and extensibility of their platform is very impressive.
Your time on UAL validating committees has led to the launch of several key courses dedicated to different aspects of AV. Why is making AV more accessible in education so important?
The challenge when you take someone studying a technology-embedded or a technology-enabled art or design discipline is then leading them towards a career in creative AV, since you are competing with every other area of tech or creative practice. The primary outcome for me is to have students work with complex AV and gain the confidence to develop content and design installations.
This results in interdisciplinary practitioners better prepared for an industry where they must understand how to use and identify the appropriate tech for a particular application. It gives them the confidence to design a solution or respond to a client brief and determine where the technology is a suitable fit for that environment – rather than relying completely on others to validate their ideas.
There’s also the importance of using industry-standard tools. From a higher education perspective, one of the things we often do is partner up with those we recognise as key players in the industry, rather than just using whatever technology happens to be available at the time.
Managing those relationships is important. You want to avoid the learning environment resembling an AV warehouse, students feeling like they’re an unwilling participant in a sales pitch or acting as brand ambassadors. But at the same time, those relationships can yield great results; sometimes, we get our hands on products that haven’t launched yet.
The partners can also get involved with the teaching and learning side of things, coming in as industry experts. They get to see how students are approaching their technology, using it in new and unusual ways they’d never considered before. Suddenly, they’re receiving high-quality feedback on what they are doing right and wrong, which they can use to improve their own R&D cycle.
What key trends have you seen emerge that will impact AV’s future?
Every sector is buzzing about how AI will help them build better and sell more products. My own relationship with AI isn’t as enthusiastic as some marketers. It certainly brings a lot to the table, but it’s crucially important that people who are promoting or relying on AI to do much of the legwork on something understand the limitations and biases it can bring. I have witnessed product designers working on the assumption that, by the time their product comes to market, the capability of AI will have sufficiently improved to the point that it can achieve what’s needed to make their product viable.
An area I’m most excited about is XR. During the Covid-19 pandemic, many film studios weren’t able to do on-location shooting. But thanks to XR technology and VP studios, they realised it was still an option to continue film and television production while people couldn’t fly around the world.
Following the pandemic, the opportunities to do more sustainable filming work increased. That’s just one aspect of it. What VP brings in terms of creating environments otherwise extremely difficult and costly to stage is very exciting. There are plenty of big-budget productions entirely shot using VP, and it’s amazing to see how that combines so many AV elements.
This feature was first published in the Autumn 2024 issue of LIVE.