The UK Government has announced that £33 million from its Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund will support Immersive technologies.
The fund aims to enable business and researchers to work together in creating the technologies which will entertain and educate the audiences of the future. These include VR (virtual reality), AR (augmented reality) and MR (mixed reality).
These transformative technologies are changing the way we experience the world in art, the classrooom and in entertainment venues and visitor attractions.
UK-based creative businesses, researchers and technology consulatants will also be eligible for funding to work together to create ground-breaking new experiences to captivate the public.
The government’s investment is part of its ambition to grow the AI (artificial intelligence) and data-driven economy. This is also one of its 4 grand challenges under the Industrial Strategy Fund, part of government’s Industrial Strategy.
Technologies to transform the audience experience
It will draw on the expertise of the UK research base and industry to fundamentally change products and services in the next 20 years. As a result, these will transform how we experience the world.
Those funded through the challenge will therefore create new products and services by utilising developing and existing immersive technologies. These will capture the world’s attention and grow the UK’s market position in the creative industries.
Britain is currently leading the way in developing immersive technologies. PWC have predicted that the UK’s VR industry is set to grow. Moreover, this growth will come at a faster rate than any other entertainment and media industry between 2016-2021. It estimates it will reach £801 million. In addition, it reckons that by 2021 there will be 16 million VR headsets in use in the UK.
Enormous growth is also forecast for the VR and video game sectors. In addition, In the next five years UK consumer spending on video games is expected to reach £5 billion.
We recently took a look at the key technologies impacting the visitor attractions sector in 6 attraction technology trends to watch in 2018.
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/immersive-technologies-for-audiences-of-the-future-new-funding
