Head Holiday is a new platform bringing together all the best virtual and 360 degree travel, cultural, creative and nature content that's currently scattered across the internet. The platform gives housebound audiences the know-how to view this content in the most immersive way possible, without the need for a headset or any virtual reality experience. Head Holiday is a curated and searchable platform full of virtual trips you can take without leaving the house, and without having a virtual reality headset. All you need is a smartphone and some cardboard to be able to take your head on a holiday around the world, whether you're anxious, bored, curious, or making plans for future travel. Curated by film festival programmers, travel and culture journalists, and environmental psychologists, the platform cuts through the noise to bring you the best existing and emerging virtual content from around the world. Don't just view these places, step inside them. With the instructions on the website, visitors can make their own cardboard virtual reality viewer by recycling household items, or follow the links to buy one cheaply online. Using these simple devices, viewers can put themselves inside these experiences quickly and easily. You can also view content without a VR viewer, navigating content from your phone or computer screen. Our ability to visit new places and feel the wellbeing benefits of nature has been restricted for the time being, but there's a wealth of 360 degree experiences we can have which are almost as good as being there -- if you know where (and how) to look. Head Holiday is a project from Live Cinema UK - researchers and producers of immersive film experiences, working nationally and internationally, and based in Yorkshire. Previous recipients of Innovate UK's Audience of the Future Design Foundations funding, their knowledge of quality immersive content, audience needs, are key to the realisation of Head Holiday, as are their partnerships across the creative and cultural industries. The technical development of the project is being created with Marmelo Digital, a London-based digital agency which specialises in creative technologies, including web, mobile, immersive and embedded systems. Their clients range from the NHS to Tesco, from the Royal Shakespeare Company to Twitter, and includes a practice designed from the ground up to work collaboratively with smaller organisations in the cultural sector. ADDITIONAL INFORMATION With the continued restrictions on travel the likes of which have never been experienced by the travel industry, combined with increasing numbers of local lockdown as Covid-19 enters its second wave, Head Holiday's provision of travel and wellbeing experiences is now arguably more in need than at time of our original application. With results from our first beta testing in November 2020, a three move extension will allow Head Holiday to to 1) implement changes for a market-ready version of the app based on user feedback, defining its primary purposes as a travel and/or wellbeing app and 2) develop business model including R&D into B2B opportunities with the travel and wellbeing sectors.

"We are consuming media more and more on our own: with VOD and virtual reality headsets enabling you to watch whatever you want at any time in your own home, Live Cinema UK and Igloo Vision want to help audiences to continue experiencing culture together in a group setting. This is a challenge, when virtual reality is designed for one person viewing content at a time, on your own, inside a headset. Live Cinema UK in partnership with Igloo Vision will explore the potential for 'shared VR' experiences which retain the collective experience of watching a moving image whilst incorporating new content, specifically 360 degree video, through a 6 month feasibility study, defining the needs of audiences and cultural organisations and developing possible technological, cultural and financial solutions. We will work to answer the following questions to work towards a solution for us to be able to enjoy immersive content together: * What does the increasing popularity of virtual reality mean for collective audience experiences? * Is this the end of social experiences in the cinema as VR technology becomes cheaper and more widely used? * Is it necessary to be isolated in a headset to enjoy 360 degree digital entertainment? This project will investigate some of the possibilities that virtual reality and 360 degree content can offer future cultural audiences, once the headsets are set aside and the audience can interact and enjoy the experience together - just as they would in a cinema, at the theatre or at a concert."