Public Funding for Sublime Digital Limited

Currently, accurate representation of physical spaces and, especially, human interactions in Virtual Reality (VR)can often feel clunky, unrealistic and require specialist knowledge and development. Our project will explore avatar use through the Unreal Meta Humans tool (an extraordinary new 3D character creation technology), specifically, testing the use of realistic avatars in soft skills training and social interactions. We will use this grant to generate ideas that address this gap in knowledge, and do fast, low-cost prototyping and user testing to further our understanding of the field. We will build and test a variety socially impactful scenarios (ranging in complexity intra- and inter-personal relationships) in VR and attempt to understand how these avatars are perceived. We will investigate whether the realism of the avatar impacts on trust, engagement, and a sense of presence. This work aims to advance the study of artificial social interactions, and guide industry practice. Edify is a platform that combines gaming tech, virtual reality and user generated content to enable accessible, immersive and engaging educational experiences. Educators can teach in virtual environments and deliver immersive lessons remotely - while participants interact and collaborate. Research in the use of avatars in teaching, specifically, immersive education, is sparse. Understanding the challenges from previous research on embodiment and avatars research can help us understand how the benefits of immersive teaching can be enhanced. With the expertise from cutting edge immersive technology (Edify.ac), computer science and psychology (University of Glasgow) we can begin connecting these individual research strands.

The Covid-19 pandemic has had a dramatic effect on education and learning delivery, with students unable to attend physical classroom spaces for traditional lessons. This has already negatively affected learner trajectories, and many will not be able to undertake vocational study and work experience due to physical distancing. This can be expected to continue for as long as social distancing is required, and even beyond as sites manage the risk of a breakout amongst its employees. ReconstuctEd3D will help mitigate these impacts by creating a Virtual Reality (VR) application that, in the first instance, will allow students studying CoYo's Design Engineering Construct (DEC) curriculum to visit building sites and visualise their designs, then secondly, use that central experience as a mechanism for the wider curriculum delivery. Young people already use smart devices and communications platforms, the challenge for ReconstructEd3D will be marrying the high value immersive experiences with current mobile technologies, and provide an adaptable solution based on the computational capability of a device. The final developed solution will give CoYo a simple tool for bringing the site to the classroom, and create intuitive, content rich lessons in VR, on hardware that is affordable and accessible. Helping users embrace distance-learning, whilst creating a remote learning solution with a broad applicability beyond the end of pandemic.

no public description

This proposal is submitted to Innovate UK for consideration of grant funding to expand the use of augmented and virtual reality in construction, by developing an Augmented Worker System enabling the intelligent design, construction, maintenance and whole-life value of construction buildings. The construction sector is a key sector to the UK economy and is a sector with considerable growth opportunity. The Government have started this investment which continues with the Digital Built Britain programme. Through the implementation of DBB, the industry will be able to deliver faster builds to a higher quality with fewer defects and more sustainable buildings. The challenge for industry is meeting the DBB Building Information Modelling (BIM) level mandated by the UK Government. The Augmented Worker System will target a reduction in cost and waste, whilst increasing productivity. A successful outcome will provide the construction industry with this Augmented Worker System to improve the construction process at every stage. The project will focus on implementing the Augmented Worker System for a modular, off-site construction company to demonstrate the impact of such a system.

"Project Mobius will convert the teaching power of Virtual Reality (VR) into a goldmine of continually expanding educational data. We will build exceptional Virtual Reality teaching applications for Higher Education, transforming student learning across a range of subjects and gaining deeper understanding of how students learn; such as how long they take to do a task, what different approaches they use, what aids the cognitive process and how well learning is retained over time as the complexity of the learning experience increases. In a classical teaching environment, capturing such fine-grained student learning data is impractical, costly and inefficient. This means that educators are deprived of valuable data that would allow them to improve and refine the learning process for their students. VR represents a potential transformation in the way teaching is traditionally delivered, but it also represents an opportunity to capture unprecedented levels of information about the learning process. Our Mobius platform will host a range of VR teaching applications from which (anonymised) learner data can be drawn. It will then interpret this data into tailored analytics reports for educators, and for the broader data market. By harnessing the power of VR, we will empower educators to create a better, more effective, student learning experience, creating a valuable stream of data in the process."