Audience of the Future: Production Innovation for Immersive Content

Key Features

UK businesses can apply for a share of up to £8 million for research and development projects to create faster, more efficient immersive content. This funding is from the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund.

Programme:     Innovate UK

Award:     Share of up to £8 million

Opens: 1st Oct 2018

Closes: 28th Nov 2018

! This scheme is now closed

Overview

Innovate UK, as part of UK Research and Innovation, will invest up to £8 million in innovation projects to enable immersive content to be created faster and more efficiently. This competition is part of the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund’s Audience of the Future (ISCF AotF) programme.

This is a single stage competition. Innovate UK require a written application, a 2-minute video and graphical representations that help demonstrate your proposal.

Scope

The aim of this competition is to explore future commercial opportunities in the creative industries through pre-commercial, innovative projects. These projects must enable immersive content to be created faster, more efficiently or in new ways which improve significantly on the current ‘state of the art’.

Your project must:

  • develop tools, products or services for creating and delivering immersive content
  • demonstrate innovation in software, hardware and/or development methodology

Innovate UK define immersive experiences as multisensory narrative or interactive experiences through technologies including:

  • virtual, mixed and augmented reality
  • haptics
  • advanced visualisation
  • other sensory interfaces

The 9 sectors in the UK creative industries are:

  1. Advertising and marketing
  2. Architecture
  3. Crafts
  4. Design: product, graphic and fashion
  5. Film, TV, video, radio and photography
  6. Computer games and services
  7. Publishing
  8. Museums, galleries and libraries
  9. Music, performing and visual arts

Exclusions

Innovate UK will not fund:

  • projects or solutions in areas other than the creative industries
  • solutions which do not enable or facilitate the creation of immersive content
  • projects which request funding for non-UK based partners or subcontractors

Eligibility

This competition is open to all creative industry organisations working with immersive technology.

To lead a project you must:

  • be a UK-registered business
  • be a content creator, or collaborate with at least one participant who is a content creator

Projects with costs:

  • under £250,000 must be led by an SME
  • over £250,000 must be collaborative and involve at least one micro, small or medium-sized enterprise (SME)

To collaborate you must be a UK based:

  • business of any size
  • research organisation
  • public sector organisation or charity undertaking research activity

All partners must:

  • carry out their project work in the UK
  • intend to exploit the results in or from the UK

Single applicants must claim funding. If the project is collaborative, the lead and at least one other organisation must claim funding.

Funding Costs

Single SME: project duration 6 to 12 months, total project costs £100,000 to £250,000.

Collaborative: project duration 6 to 18 months, total project costs £250,000 to £1 million.

All projects must start by 1 April 2019 and end by 31 December 2020.

For feasibility studies and industrial research projects, you could get funding for your eligible project costs of:

  • up to 70% if you are a micro or small business
  • up to 60% if you are a medium-sized business
  • up to 50% if you are a large business

For experimental development projects which are nearer to market, you could get funding for your eligible project costs of:

  • up to 45% if you are a micro or small business
  • up to 35% if you are a medium-sized business
  • up to 25% if you are a large business