The first successful recipients of Audience of the Future Challenge funding have been announced.
Thirty two projects have been awarded a share of the £1m Design Foundations Fund. Each project will focus on human-centred design, to create new immersive experiences, products and services. They will use customer research to generate ideas, and create and test low-cost prototypes and the best ideas will progress to further technical research and development (R&D).
The successful projects are part of the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund’s Audience of the Future programme, which is delivered by UK Research and Innovation. Through this programme, government is supporting the best UK storytellers to create engaging immersive experiences.
Successful projects include:
Scent Bubbles: The Feelies Ltd & University of Sussex
An investigation into the design foundations of a groundbreaking new type of scent delivery for immersive experiences, with minimal lingering and equipment, and greater flexibility than existing methods. The development will be centred around the learnings, practice, problems and needs of the creators of those immersive experiences.
The human-centered process in this project will reach out to XR and digital theatre creators as a small and innovative pool around whom to base the first parts of this technology design; yet it could later have applications for fields from industry to marketing and retail.
The Distance Between Us: AKA Media Ltd
Noticing an ever-widening chasm in public discourse, documentary filmmaker Aela Callan and war correspondent Kate Parkinson teamed up to find ways that technology and storytelling can be used to bridge entrenched divides
This project will research how interactive storytelling in VR can be used to foster understanding and common ground between people who hold opposing views. Their experiments will allow them to develop deep insights about their target audience, and design a narrative journey that strengthens software development of the experience.
LIME – Live Immersive Music Experiences: Mativision Limited
Producing and delivering Live Music and Live events as immersive experiences is still following the TV-Broadcast paradigm. In the fast developing era of immersive and interactive experiences, new and innovative methods and approaches are needed to enable the creative industries to take advantage of the available and emerging VR/AR/MX and XR technologies. LIME is a feasibility study to enable Mativision to research next-generation immersive experiences from live music and live performances and the ways such immersive experiences can be distributed and viewed by the target audiences live, but remotely from the event.