The Innovate UK Immersive Tech Awards 2025 showcase and celebrate exceptional work from the most promising extended reality (XR) talent in the United Kingdom. Their ideas are an inspiration of innovation and collaboration underpinning the immersive tech community’s ongoing quest to discover real-world solutions across a wide variety of sectors.
If you haven’t done so yet, then book your ticket to attend the awards ceremony in London on 2 June and experience out the showcase demos in person. We will add the project videos later on in the month.
After months of receiving entries and weeks of evaluation with our panel of experts, we are delighted to announce which projects and individuals have been shortlisted.
Finalists of the five university categories below will have the opportunity to interview for paid internships with our amazing industry partners Snap Inc., Arup, Soluis, StoryLab Research Institute, Wales Millennium Centre and Sugar Creative Studio.
Best Immersive Game
Kewin Skrzekut, Leyi Zhou, Kris Harwood, Yiping Li – UAL: London College of Communication – The Warming Table
This mixed-reality game explores the environmental impact of food choices on global warming. The ‘table’ in the game represents the food acquired during the shopping stage, symbolising how the food on our tables contributes to warming the planet. In addition, the name of the game plays on a double meaning, referring to the warm, social atmosphere of bringing people together for a collective experience.
Xinjing Li, Yan Chen, Suyeon Lee, Yiman Liu, Zemeng Li – Goldsmiths, University of London – Puppy in Home
Puppy in Home is a virtual reality (VR) game that blends puzzle solving with emotional storytelling wherein players unlock pathways that lead into a maze resembling scenes from a typical home. At each rotation, players reveal fragments of everyday life and gradually uncover the final mystery – that they have been controlling a loyal dog striving to save its owner. This game conveys a heartfelt message about the deep bond of companionship and protection between pets and their owners.
Creative XR Storytelling
Shan-Ting Chang, Yu-Shu Hsu, Shuai Wang – University of Bristol – Sweet Dreams
Content warning – discretion advised.
Sweet Dreams introduces an active narrative approach to exploring an important and relatively new social issue of digital sexual violence and exploitation.
Created as a first-person immersive VR experience, it explores sexual violence and digital privacy, inspired by real-life cases of online sexual exploitation. Within the experience, the audience embodies the protagonist, Elena Varela, fully inhabiting her body and navigating a room where past and present memories intertwine. Through environmental storytelling and interaction, they uncover Elena’s experiences of sexual exploitation, harassment, and the devastating impact it had on her life. Trapped as her spirit, the audience must relive her trauma, confront the past, and ultimately find peace and rebirth.
Unlike passive storytelling, Sweet Dreams requires active engagement, such as checking Elena’s diary, phone, and scattered clues to piece together her past. The experience brings the game player into a deeply emotional journey, fostering empathy for victims of digital sexual violence. As a medium that enables immersion, presence, and embodiment, VR offers compelling and impactful ways to raise awareness of the lived experience of survivors.
Tomis Fras – UAL: London College of Communication – Sonderambla
Sonderambla is an immersive experience set in VR and MR with physical theatrical elements. The story is a study on sonder: the realisation that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own. The aim is to encourage the user to practise sonder first-hand by learning the concepts of sonder and radical empathy and to use them in their larger life and to take that philosophy with them in their day-to-day life afterwards.
Sensory
Tianyuan Zhang – Goldsmiths, University of London – Sensing Nature
Sensing Nature is an interactive, multi-sensory VR installation designed to energise, delight and nourish the spirit by reimagining the natural world. It offers a responsive, playful experience that fosters a deep sense of connection and wellbeing. Users interact with a physical tree installation with haptic elements, exploring real-world fabrics and textures to build their virtual world. Every touch causes the tree to grow, unlocking flowers, music and natural sounds, creating a unique sensory experience.
Giorgos Karambasis Rodriguez – Kingston University London – Deadlift
Deadlift is a medieval fantasy VR arena fighter game with two game-modes that combines entertainment with fitness, specifically calisthenics. The player takes the role of a necromancer tasked with fighting waves of enemies assaulting their castle. The player uses their powers to dispatch the enemies, powered by a source of magic called Aether. Aether can only be regenerated via calisthenics exercises, in the form of push-ups, squats and planks.
Technical Innovation
Xiang Li – Robinson College, University of Cambridge – microGEXT
microGEXT is a microgesture-based system designed for efficient and precise text editing in VR. Unlike traditional input methods that rely on controllers or large-scale gestures, microGEXT enables users to perform text selection, editing, and navigation using subtle, low-fatigue hand movements, eliminating the need for external sensors. MicroGEXT reduces user fatigue, enhances editing speed and improves usability over conventional VR text input methods.
Emily Godden – Anglia Ruskin University – The Dunwich Rose
The Dunwich Rose is an outdoor night-time site specific XR ghost story exploring how we can sustainably develop immersive storytelling. Dunwich, aka The Lost City, is largely underwater and was once second only to London in population in the UK. Sightings have been made of shadowy figures along the cliff top at Dunwich for centuries, while lights and chanting voices have also been recorded. This immersive story follows Rose – a ghost whose story is far from unique – and works with ghosts to question the materiality and sustainability of immersive storytelling.
UX & UI Design
Jie Fu – Creative Computing Institute, University of the Arts London – Dream Space XR
Dream Space XR is an AI-powered 3D content creation system that combines generative AI and spatial computing to efficiently create immersive environments. It simplifies the 3D modelling process by converting 2D inputs into high-quality 3D models and enables intuitive user interaction using multimodal inputs such as gesture recognition and gaze tracking. Dream Space XR aims to make immersive content creation more accessible and contributes to the evolution of digital storytelling, VR world-building and real-time collaborative XR design.
Cristina Fiani – School of Computing Science, University of Glasgow – The Future of Child Safety in the Metaverse: Prototyping AI Embodied Moderators for Social VR informed by insights from Children, Parents and Experts
Social VR platforms have millions of users everyday, many of whom are children, that interact through embodied avatars in fully immersive, 3D digital spaces. While these platforms are typically designed for users aged 13 and above, younger children are drawn to them due to their rich social experiences and freedom. With these new forms of socialising come challenges, including novel types of harassment – not only verbal, but also physical (for example intrusive avatar) and environmental (such as displaying inappropriate content).
The anonymity of these spaces amplifies these harms, and existing safeguards are inadequate, mostly due to the lack of scalability of human moderation and the drawbacks of traditional safeguarding tools that place the responsibility on children who are fully immersed and may not have the maturity to act effectively.
This project demonstrates the potential of Automated Embodied Moderators (AEMs) – AI-driven, avatar-based moderators designed to intervene in real time, that can offer context-aware, interactive and embodied safety mechanisms to enhance children’s perceived sense of safety while maintaining their agency in VR.
Career Breakout Showcase
We are also pleased to announce the finalists from the emerging talent community. The winner will be selected by our expert judging panel at the awards reception:
Nneka Iwunna Ezemezue – The Wait
The Wait is a narrative-driven experience that will immerse viewers in the emotional complexities of infertility, loss and hope. By integrating interactive architectural environments, the space itself becomes a living reflection of waiting, yearning and coping. As the environment shifts and evolves, it mirrors the psychological journey in ways that words alone cannot capture. Nneka is a multidisciplinary artist with a background in graphic design and photography, who is now transitioning into immersive arts since participating in the Birmingham Open Media (BOM) Immersive Art Bootcamp.
Lezan Mawlood – Fragmented Realms
Lezan is a digital artist and designer who is currently exploring the intersection of immersive technology and surreal aesthetics. Lezan’s work blends 3D modelling, animation and interactive design to create visually striking digital environments and craft compelling experiences that blur the line between art and technology. For this project, Lezan created a concept opening credit sequence inspired by her favourite animes, that incorporate 3D modelling in and world-building.
Clodagh Delahunty-Forrest – Trinket
Trinket is a gothic stop-motion short film that merges physical animation with virtual world-building. The film tells the story of a young girl cursed to transform into a Magpie monster at night, exploring themes of isolation, anxiety, and the comfort found in small, stolen treasures. Drawing from personal experiences with OCD, Trinket combines handcrafted stop-motion characters with digital environments and assets that Clodagh built to create a unique blend of the tangible and digital. Clodagh was challenged to push the boundaries of filmmaking and art whilst participating in the Immersive Art Bootcamp at Birmingham Open Media (BOM).
Nurbanu Asena Karakaya – Cambridge ReseARch Trail
Cambridge ReseARch Trail is a new augmented reality trail that showcases the world leading research of the University of Cambridge in a new light. It does so by visualising the current and historic research done on the university grounds and making it come to life with animated graphics. Each step in the trail leads the audience to a webpage, where they can get more information about the research, ideas, scientist or discoveries. Nurbanu trained as a visual arts and animation creative and is developing skills to build more experiences.
Commenting on the awards entries, Asha Easton and Amy Chao of the Innovate UK Immersive Tech Network agreed that:
“Our finalists truly reflect the diversity, vibrancy and sheer ingenuity of the UK’s ever-expanding immersive technology community. With so many amazing projects and ideas entered this year, all our finalists should feel immensely proud of their achievement. We can’t wait to celebrate them in June!”
With a record number of entries received, we are incredibly grateful to everyone who shared their innovative XR ideas for these one-of-a-kind awards that connect students to the immersive technology industry. We believe it to be an enormous privilege to showcase up-and-coming individuals and university project teams to our esteemed panel of judges whose own unique creative, technological, commercial and academic perspectives have yet again proven invaluable to our diligent and fair process.
We can’t wait to experience our finalists’ brilliant projects in virtual reality, mixed reality and augmented reality technologies! Book your ticket and join us to celebrate our finalists’ achievements at our awards reception on 2 June in London.
If you’re not able to join us at the awards, please consider becoming a member of our community and sign up to the Innovate UK Immersive Tech Network newsletter for updates about these awards, funding opportunities, relevant news and events.