A new film that uses virtual reality (VR) technology to immerse users in the acid house party movement in 1989 has started its tour of the UK in Birmingham. 

The film, In Pursuit Of Repetitive Beats, sees the user become a character in a scene where, before mobile phones were available, party-goers listened to pirate radio for a number to call to find the secret location for a warehouse rave on the outskirts of the West Midlands.

Users are fitted with a VR headset and a haptic suit which allows them to feel vibrations.

They have two hand-held controllers that allow them to hold and pick things up in the virtual environment.

Interviewees who contributed to the project include pirate radio DJs, ravers, MCs and police officers who were tasked with identifying where the warehouse parties were taking place in order to shut them down.

Lee Fisher, who was a pirate radio DJ who performed at some of the parties, said that the search for the locations was one his strongest memories of the events.

“I guess my memory of those warehouse parties, first of all, was finding out about them,” he says in the film.

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He continues: “Then the kind of excitement of finding the location, then is the party going to happen, or is the party going to get closed down?

“And then going through that kind of that whole cycle of anxiety to finally getting into this space and then there’s just a release of adrenaline.”

Tim Godwin, a retired West Midlands police officer, was seconded to the force’s acid house squad in the late 1980s.

“The responsibility of the squad was to gather intelligence, disrupt activity and try and gather evidence to prosecute individuals involved,” he says in the piece.

He adds: “We would have a radio set… we would be listening to the same messages that people who wanted to attend the event would be listening for, so we would be listening for locations or phone numbers, or indications of meeting points.”

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“Sometimes they would give a false location so you could get to the other location without the police attending,” says Vicky Dixon, one of the film’s contributors.

The film aims to shine a light on the West Midlands as a key part of the emergence of British dance music culture, according to its director, Darren Emerson.

“A lot of people are celebrated when it comes to the emergence of acid house and rave culture. You hear a lot about London, you hear a lot about Manchester and even places like Blackburn. But actually the West Midlands is a real important place, a real pioneering place for this type of music,” he said.

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The experience is one of a range of VR films that create a 360-world around the user to try and bring imaginary environments, or memories, to life.

Using VR technology to recreate environments in history raises questions about accuracy but there are ways around this, according to Sylvia Xueni Pan, professor of virtual reality at Goldsmiths, University of London.

“There are different ways to actually recreate history, and obviously, if you actually recreate anything from your memory or from reading material from pictures, you are doing it with your own subjectivity,” she said.

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She added: “But technically, there are ways to actually scan some real objects or find data that you have stored historically and try to recreate those objects more realistically.

“You’re really trying to simulate from real data rather than trying to recreate it. So there might be a compromise between both methods.”

In Pursuit Of Repetitive Beats, which was produced by East City Films, will be available to experience in a number of cities across the UK over the next year, including Belfast, Cardiff and Brighton.

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