Immersive Media Laboratory

Advanced digital, immersive visualisation resources to support creative ideation, prototyping and product development.

“We estimate there are 1,000 immersive-specialist companies in the UK employing around 4,500 people and generating £660 million in sales, potentially representing as much as 9% of the global market share. If UK specialists grow in line with market forecasts, they stand to generate over £1 billion in sales in 2018. We also estimate that half a million people work in companies with some participation in the immersive economy.” (Innovate UK, 2018).

The Faculty of Arts and Humanties' Immersive Media Laboratory is an exciting new development which is being established as a core facility to support teaching, research and enterprise activities across art, architecture, design, the built environment and engineering subjects. The new facility will be open to testing new games, products, immersive experiences, educational innovations and medical simulations to name a few uses, and will welcome creative interdisciplinary collaborations from all sectors wishing to experiment with augmented (AR), mixed (MR) and virtual reality (VR).

The new labs will provide facilities for 3D scanning and motion capture as well as a black box space to experiment with VR, AR and MR technologies. The space offers an opportunity for experimentation and interdisciplinary collaboration and will be intimately connected with the Digital Fabrication Lab next door.

The lab aspires not only to create greater connections across subject areas and to seek out innovation at the intersection of disciplines, but also to re-define the way in which we teach students and undertake research with a far greater emphasis on Industry involvement and engagement.

The lab provides an opportunity to mix students, researchers and industry together in applied creative endeavours that will eventually provide benefit for to society and the economy both locally and globally.

Immersive media allows you to experience and change your creations prior to the need for any expensive manufacturing/building processes with incredible realism and in real time. The result is the ability to get your creations out into the world faster, whilst improving quality and also saving time and costly decisions on engineering changes further down the manufacturing process.

The ability to see your designs as large, comprehensive images can enable you to see things that you might not otherwise find out until much later in development - the movement of a particular part or a flaw in the simulation, for example. This type of shared visualisation also allows greater connection and communication across disciplines – facilitating interdisciplinary team work in complex technical simulation scenarios.