One in four of us have experienced mental health challenges. COVID 19 means that today, more of us are experiencing mental health challenges than ever before. The individual and societal cost of poor mental health are huge. Poor mental health costs the UK alone over £45 billion a year, an equivalent of 25% of the TOTAL NHS budget last year. Over the past 10 years, most of us have used digital technology to change how we buy things, bank and socialise. But, we do not use digital technology to positively help our mental health. Immersive technologies like augmented / virtual reality (AR/VR) offer a unique way to positively impact mental health. As humans, we have a deeper connection with virtual reality than digital-only technologies - like websites or apps. The aim of this project is to build an AR/VR digital service that incorporates state-of-the-art science (neuroscience / cognitive behavioural science). By the end of the project we will have built a digital immersive technology that someone can use on their phone, and tried it with people. We will have worked with people who would potentially buy the service when it is ready to understand how it can work as a business.

Producers of screen fiction face a daunting challenge in capturing the attention of audiences. The current gold standard used by industry CEOs and film content producers to understanding if a film or TV pilot will be commercially viable is audience testing. The structure of audience testing has changed little since it was first used in 1928\. A target audience is invited to preview content in a theatre. Afterward, the audience fills out questionnaires rating the show or film they have seen. A smaller focus group of twenty or thirty is then asked to stay and discuss their reactions in more detail, with questioning focused primarily upon ascertaining an overall rating (e.g., "What was your reaction to the movie overall?") and generalised aspects of the film (e.g. "list which scenes or moments of the movie you liked the most/least?"). There are a number of limitations with this approach: * Since audience testing was conceived, our understanding of how emotional responses and individual differences shape how we evaluate experiences has advanced * Audience testing was never designed for fully immersive experiences. It remains unknown how well existing audience testing methodologies can explain how audiences will consume 3D content * Target audiences are selected on the basis of superficial characteristics (age, ethnicity) instead of the self-relevant traits that better determine interest and engagement * It is prohibitively expensive for productions operating on a shoe-string budget To address these needs we are running a feasibility study to test a new approach to audience testing. This will involve content creators labeling onscreen events for their desired emotional response and then testing if audiences show the desired response. To achieve the aims of this feasibility study we will: * Investigate what features of 2D and 3D experiences content creators would like feedback on * Develop a prototype system of SimLabVR for demonstration purposes sufficient to show proof of principle * Run a pilot study to test if it is possible to identify a target audience using emotional responses alone, without reliance on superficial characteristics.