The WAVE project is **designing and testing** ways to help people to manage cognitive, emotional and physical anxiety symptoms, wherever they are.
Through a **smartphone application integrated with peripheral XR technologies,** WAVE reimagines how this ubiquitous technology can be used to greater effect in the management of mental health, for mass-market adoption, helping people aged 13+, 65+ and everyone in between.
We already know that anxiety is on the rise, particularly in the wake of COVID19\. We also know that individuals on average check their phone every 12 minutes, often to quell boredom, loneliness, and anxiety. Yet oftentimes this does not ease symptoms, instead it makes them worse. WAVE will turn this habitual consumer behaviour on its head by providing anxiety relieving XR content, improving on state-of-the-art smartphone applications.
**Our foreground research into the current XR wellbeing market and the likely prevailing consumer trends, indicate the following innovations are needed to improve the current state-of-the-art:**
* Mindfulness based smartphone applications reaching mass-markets such as Headspace and Calm do not currently support XR plug-ins which could help users to achieve greater external attentional focus which is key to achieving mindfulness.
* A high proportion of XR wellbeing innovations focus on leveraging VR, which does not address how to manage anxiety symptoms in the moment wherever users happen to be. Neither does it offer an affordable mass-market solution since headsets are still at relatively low levels of market penetration.
* Many products do not offer scientifically robust mindfulness content. i2's cutting-edge research over the last 20+ years shows that water-based mindfulness content is an underexplored area for lowering cortisol and aiding restoration and mindfulness.
Given this compelling evidence. **Through WAVE we will:**
* Thoroughly evaluate mechanisms and content (in different combinations) which support relaxation in younger and older consumers
* Audience-test a range of prototypes which bring to life water-based content and the XR mechanism(s) which can be augmented with a smartphone and are most likely to effectively reduce anxiety across a range of contexts. (_It is expected we will test the success of haptic integrations on a smartphone, spatialized audio and visual content with our defined target market.)_
* Develop a unified prototype solution as well as a formal specification and roadmap towards WAVE's full development and commercialisation (through follow-on RD&I); and,
* Disseminate our findings to best benefit the UK's health sector, and end users
The ACT project is **designing and evaluating** ways to **enable audience members to feel connected to each other** when they are experiencing a show in different places. This **connection with other audience members** is a valued part of the experience of location-based productions. It is also one which tends to be **missing for audiences watching a show remotely** (e.g., from home.)
In its work on the Innovate UK funded Audience of the Future Performance Demonstrator, i2 media research limited combined both in-depth and large-scale audience research to identified that audiences were missing because of the pandemic. Connection with others during live shows came out as the thing audiences were missing most.
In the Demonstrator project's show (dream.online), we tested two ways to connect audiences at home. These were a live counter which showed how many other people were watching each show, and an interactive function, where audiences could shoot digital fireflies into the performance space to guide the main character, Puck. For some audiences, both were successful in supporting a feeling of watching the show with others.
However, lots of other mechanisms could do the same thing. And as we have learnt through our over 25 years' research on user experience of digital content some might be better.
Through ACT, we will:
\* evaluate mechanisms to support remotely located audiences to feel connected to one another;
\* test a prototype of the most easily and widely applicable mechanism, which is best at helping audiences at home feel connected to other audience members;
\* develop a detailed plan to develop this into a product and launch it; and
\* share our findings widely to best support the UK's creative and cultural sector.
**ACT's focus is of vital relevance** to the UK (and global) **creative industries**. With location-based shows cancelled during the pandemic, creative and cultural organisations lost nearly all ticket revenue. Audiences got to experience some **video streams of shows**, but nearly all **lacked solutions to support audiences feeling together**.
**Simple solutions** to help audiences at home feel connected to each other while watching live shows with others around the world will **enable arts and cultural organisations to build back better**, with stronger and more **sustainable revenue models**.
The results of this project, and its subsequent commercialisation, will also **apply to other sectors of the Creative Industries (e.g., Film and TV)**. ACT will therefore support a more sustainable and thriving creative and cultural sector.
This Audience of the Future demonstrator project, led by the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), brings together, for the first time, a unique team of cultural industry practitioners and researchers who are ideally placed to inform and guide the next developmental stage of Live Performance.
Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), and Mixed Reality (MR) offer under-exploited opportunities for the UK cultural sector to make Live Performance more immersive. We have already seen a new era of theatre borrowing conventions from video games to tell stories - and we know that audiences want "to find fun, interactive experiences and share them with the world" (Brian Schwab, Head of Interaction Lab at Magic Leap).
Our consortium will explore what it means to perform live through multiple channels, and the future of real-time immersive performance connected across multiple stages. Audiences will no longer be bound by their location - instead we will use devices such as mobile phones, Extended Reality (XR) headsets and streams into a Live Performance environment, or in the home. We will investigate the new workflows required to deliver this, and the new ways of making the creative content that bring VR/AR/MR into theatre-making and Live Performance.
During 2019 each partner will develop a series of prototype projects, drawing on their extensive expertise in site-specific performance, whether this is music and audio, audience development or theatre. We will develop new models for Live Performance that focus on the future needs of audiences with the development of new technologies, working in partnership with Magic Leap, Intel and Epic Games, and specialist companies such as Vicon and FBFX.
This research and development (R&D) work will lead to our main demonstrator performance, at the heart of the RSC's autumn 2020 programme, connecting to a main stage Shakespeare production in the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon.
This project will broaden the possibilities of Live Performance, from digital broadcast, as is the case for live-to-digital work currently, to a mass distributed digital model on multiple platforms. Audiences will connect with the performance live, wherever their location, celebrating the strengths of digital connectivity and establishing a high quality Live Performance to be enjoyed, in a variety of ways, around the world.
MINDScape's Flashy connected retail app/service bridges the online and offline shopper experience. Flashy provides the functionality and use cases today's consumers are used to online, and some novel ones, to the physical retail environment. Combining state of the art location and behaviour tracking, delivered by its co-inventors HW Communications, with i2 media's psychology-based models of shopper behaviour, Flashy provides a consumer app to track offers and deals on in-store products they've shown interest in. Flashy also provides retailers with a new platform to engage consumers, rewarding consumer engagement with products with offers and deals to generate sales, engagement and loyalty.