Public Funding for Pixelmill Ltd

Planet Wellbeing - using extended reality to improve mental health and reduce loneliness. One in 15 people aged 50+ are often lonely, rising to one in three for those who are widowed, and one in four for those in poor health. Loneliness and social isolation have numerous health consequences including 26% increased mortality likelihood and more than doubling the risk of developing dementia. Lonely individuals are more prone to both depression and suicide. Many older people are unable to maintain rewarding in-person connections due to restricted physical mobility or mental health issues such as anxiety or depression. For this group digital engagement via rich, multiuser extended reality games may provide opportunities for deep social engagement and significant agency; however, these games are often not designed for older people. We previously developed a user interface that captured older-people's real-world physical actions and used them to navigate a rich virtual world. We showed that older users were able to interact and perform complex activities in the virtual world, with natural movements giving them a strong sense of presence.We will develop Planet WellBeing - a virtual world to allow people to use natural physical movements to control their avatar performing fun and engaging activities with friends and family and/or strangers in a virtual environment. These activities could include exploring on foot or in vehicles, dancing, games, interacting with robot animals, etc. As well as non-moderated use, some sessions will be led by expert-practitioners/therapists who will facilitate rich social interactions and conversations that participants may find difficult in real-world settings. We suggest the rich social engagement within this world will benefit users' mental wellbeing and reduce feelings of loneliness. We will : -Co design the physical interfaces and virtual scenarios with older people -Develop Planet WellBeing - an age-appropriate virtual environment ; suitable for at-home use by older users. -Recruit between 15-25 users as a minimum with potential to increase to 50, at home for 12 week period, providing immersive hardware. -Assess mental health as well as loneliness, usability, engagement, physical and quality of life outcomes at the start end, and at points throughout the 12 weeks. This work will include demonstrator and trials for later large scale study and eventual system rollout. The project will be led by immersive specialists PixelMill , with the support of the Advanced Wellbeing Research Centre (AWRC) at Sheffield Hallam University, Shapemaster Global and Age UK Sheffield.

Exercise is very helpful for the health and happiness of older adults, but only a small number of older people do enough regular exercise to make a difference. Shapemaster is a British company that makes power assisted exercise machines. These machines have motors that help to perform the exercise for people who would otherwise find it difficult. This is particularly helpful for people who live with pain, have restricted movement or have low confidence in their physical ability. The machines are available in leisure centres and don't need any special clothing or other equipment, making them suitable for people who don't see themselves as sporty, or who have low income levels. Because we want to increase the number of older adults using these machines to exercise we will investigate the following things: 1. What will encourage more users to use the machines? This will include improving how users with restricted movement get on and off the machines, making them more fun by linking them to computer games, displaying how well people have done and allowing them to share this with friends and family. 2. What will make leisure centres more likely to install Shapemaster equipment? This might include price and what sort of things the machines can do. We will investigate these things by interviewing users and leisure centres, and also by making different prototypes for users to try so they can experience it for themselves. We will interview a wide range of users including people with disabilities and from different ethnic backgrounds. Once we have chosen the best designs to make the most number of people active, we will build full versions of them, and then try them out with many different users. We will see how much they like them, and how likely they are to get people to start and stick-with exercise. We will also see if there are any benefits for people's health and happiness. Finally, we will plan how best to get the machines as widely used as possible in the UK and worldwide, to give as many people as possible the chance to use it. We hope that by doing this we will help to make people fitter, healthier and happier.

We aim to revolutionise the rail industry by providing an automatic drone asset mapping and 3D location based reporting system, that will enable mapping , review and maintenance of assets. The existing method of asset mapping requires intensive manual work. Engineers need to take a photo and make measurements manually of the area of interest. This data is logged in a paper report which makes it difficult to search, compare and utilise afterwards. Further innovation and Artificial Intelligence (AI) is limited because there is no method of recording accurate asset data and their location. We are proposing a new 3D database and interface system that can generate, store, visualise and utilise 3D data online in real time. Our platform can generate 3D model from camera/drone/satellite images, import other 3D asset data, integrate with real time monitoring sensors, and enable multiple users to search, compare, annotate the 3D model and related data in real time. Our solution can be used via multiple platforms either on desktop, tablet, in a VR immersive or exported to AR devices for on site use. Our system would make it faster to survey, inspect, maintain and repair rail assets, and provide a more accurate way to track and compare changes in 3D. With an accurate data position, we could have a more accurate AI that can assist in decision making of predictive and preventive maintenance that was not possible before and provide 'Minimal disruption to train service'.

eXperium is an immersive virtual world that brings the power of technology from the world of games to aggregate, present and exercise data about complex infrastructure in an interactive, immersive and collaborative manner. The study will investigate through a proof of concept how this approach can be applied to support the nuclear decommissioning process at Sellafield, making it more efficient and safer. Sites like Sellafield tend to use a wide variety of independent design and modelling tools to process and present data. eXperium will provide a collaborative and time based view of the infrastructure and data in a virtual world by; importing infrastructure descriptions in the form of CAD/BIM, Photogrammetry, laserscan, video and live feeds; accessing live data about assets from databases; creating time based scenarios that can help plan changes to the infrastructure in 4D; presenting infrastructure, data and scenarios using virtual/augmented/mixed reality using VR headsets, Rift and Vive, Google Tango and Hololens. This will be trialled as a PoC with Sellafield. CL sees opportunities for this product across the nuclear, energy and wider infrastructure industries.

CityVerve is based around the large-scale deployment of technologies, where everyday objects can be connected to a network in order to share data. This approach will demonstrate and evidence the benefits to citizens’ through environmental improvements, economic opportunities, and the more efficient and effective delivery of services such as transport, healthcare and energy. It will provide the ability to create new services and operating models through the interoperability between transport, healthcare and energy systems. The geographical focus of CityVerve will be Greater Manchester; a city region which has been at the forefront of the city devolution agenda, in particular health and social care provision, leading the way in designing new ways of delivering services and providing the blueprint for other cities in the UK and beyond. CityVerve will build on these opportunities to provide a once-in-a-generation opportunity to transform healthcare and other city services around the needs of people, not only is this is an urgent priority for Greater Manchester, but a challenge faced by many global cities.

Visualisation of Building Information Management without the need for a BIM platform to enable greater use across construction supply organisations.

The study, to be undertaken by a consortium of Clicks and Links Ltd, Ove Arup and Partners and the University of Manchester, along with a range of knowledge partners from Greater Manchester will look at the feasibility of creating a model of an Urban Virtual Energy Exchange (U-VEX ).This model will be used as the basis for both scenario/business planning and operational tools for an Urban Energy Enterprise. Such an enterprise would include access to and management of energy flows between local energy generation, local energy storage and demand participation assets as well as the ability to trade with external energy sources. The study will investigate the technical, legal, commercial, operational and institutional elements of such a model using Greater Manchester as a reference. The output of the study will be a series of reports detailing the feasibility or not of such a model, including prototypes of how it might work practically and a business plan for its development.