MyWorld Collaborative Research & Development

Innovate UK, part of UK Research and Innovation, is delivering this competition on behalf of MyWorld, a project funded by the UKRI Strength in Places Fund. It builds on the West of England’s strengths in creative media production, technology and research.

MyWorld is a 5 year programme that presents opportunities to create, deliver and understand experiences in creative technology, driving forward the future of media in the UK and beyond.

The aim of this competition is to help the UK to grow and maintain a position as an international leader in advanced media production. MyWorld is combining research excellence, industrial stakeholders and a history of collaboration in the Bristol and Bath region.

Your project must:

• have a total grant funding request of between £100,000 and £200,000
• start by 1 January 2023
• end by 31 December 2024
• last between 12 and 24 months
• carry out all of its project work in the UK
• intend to exploit the results from or in the West of England area

To lead a project or your organisation must:

• be a UK registered business of any size, not for profit or charity
• collaborate with other UK registered organisations

Academic institutions cannot lead but can be a collaborative partner. The lead organisation may be based outside of the West of England area, but if so, justification must be made in your application as to why the project could not be led by an organisation from the West of England area. The lead organisation must collaborate with at least one research organisation or research and technology organisation in the West of England area.

MyWorld supports the generation of innovative ideas and solutions for the creative industries. It addresses the need to develop diverse technologies associated with:

• the capture, manipulation, distribution and consumption of experiences effectively
• the understanding of audiences’ responses-to and interactions-with those experiences

This includes the requirement to deliver adaptive audience experiences efficiently, at scale and quality across a multitude of devices.

Your project must:

• provide solutions that tackle new or emerging challenges or needs of the Creative Continuum
• demonstrate a realistic potential to deliver business growth, scale up, and job creation
• actively share knowledge and outputs with the MyWorld programme and wider creative technology industry

Your project must focus on screen based and immersive technologies within the creative sector industries.

Creating experiences:

How acquisition, production and delivery relate to narrative, aesthetic and content type in modulating experience, leading to new intelligent acquisition and production methods that facilitate immersion.

For example:

• utilising machine learning for virtual human capture
• rigging and animation
• low light video acquisition and restoration
• creation and testing of automated physical platforms for cameras
• refining motion capture data with machine learning and large datasets

Delivering experiences:

Platforms, network technology and representations that support new forms of content delivery and interactivity, delivery processes that ensure the preservation of immersive properties during transmission.

For example:

• developing Mobile Edge Computing to support enhanced location accuracy
• improved latency
• media aware network slicing
• exploiting the potential of deep learning for enhancing video compression

Measuring experiences:

Perceptually robust means of assessing media quality and immersion that inform creative practice and editorial decision making and that differentiate the impacts of technology and narrative.

For example:

• creation of new tools and platforms for audience assessment
• assessment of existing tools and platforms