Learn more about the incredible projects showcasing at Bristol Technology Festival.
Most of the projects you see today were provided tailored support by Digital Catapult as part of the MyWorld Challenge Call 2 and CR&D 1 funding calls.
Challenge Call 2 Projects
The MyWorld Challenge Call programmes have awarded £50,000 to a total of 18 companies, alongside a 16-week accelerator programme delivered by Digital Catapult.
Amplifying Imagination: AI in the Creative Industries is the second MyWorld Challenge Call. The theme looks to address Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions optimising or enabling creative approaches or processes, specifically addressing industry challenges related to the creation, delivery, and evaluation of experience.
Tutti – SuperScout iOS Companion App
Tutti has a simple mission: to give creative people more time to create, by reducing their admin with technology.
Project details
The people who find the amazing locations behind your favourite movies and shows currently spend a ridiculous amount of time on admin. They spend 12 hours travelling, taking photos in one place, notes in another, and then get home and spend another 6 hours compiling and organising their work for their team. Our app will remove those 6 hours: allowing them to gather all information in one place, organise while they’re on the road, and upload in the background.
Weaving Change – Swerv/Outfit Recommendation Algorithm (ORA)
The mission of Weaving Change is to make sustainable fashion more accessible, educate about destructive industry practices and facilitate a more circular fashion economy.
Project details
Weaving Change will develop its novel Outfit Recommendation Algorithm, the first of its kind to offer pleasing outfit recommendations based on a user’s preferences. ORA will sit within Swerv, the sustainable fashion app which will change our relationship with fashion.
Nulight Studios – Virtuoso AI
Nulight Studios is a leading UK provider of motion picture film scanning, restoration and digital remastering services to the broadcast and film distribution market.
Project details
Fictioneers – Project Echo (AKQA LEAP)
Fictioneers was born in Bristol as an R&D project within the AKQA Leap studio and partnered with Aardman Studios for The Big Fix Up. Now we’re building out a cloud-based platform for creating, collaborating and operating personalised digital experiences that blend the real and virtual world.
Project Echo is a Fictioneers R&D experiment into how we might extend the capabilities of independent producers and creators to build new audio and transmedia experiences from existing archival materials.
The Gentleman Octopus – Introspect
The Gentleman Octopus is a creative and immersive technology design consultancy, applying robotic technology and engineering approaches to provide both design services and bespoke installations to festivals, marketing, music events and immersive experiences.
Project details
‘Introspect’ focuses on the intersection between the audience and the performance of a XR music show, using AI to facilitate more personal experiences. It will pass sensor data from XR headsets worn by an audience, to an AI model in order to create responsive and generative visualisations of audio in real time and lead audience members to interact and share the experience.
Black Goblin – Thol
Black Goblin is an audio research and technology company focusing on creating innovative solutions that enable creatives to work with sound in a transformative and artistic-driven way.
Project details
Thol is the company’s debut product in development. It is a sound design suite that uses machine learning to generate custom and high-quality sound effects that perfectly match the image. Thol reduces costs and time-consuming processes, but most importantly, it allows creators to customise and retain full authorship.
IMPRESS / Force Of Habit
IMPRESS is the all-in-one indie game marketing suite. We help indie game developers, micro-publishers and marketing agencies by consolidating brand & creator monitoring, social media scheduling, marketing infrastructure (press kits) and market analysis tools into a single unified solution.
Project details
CR&D1 Projects
As part of MyWorld’s Collaborative Research and Development (CR&D) Open Calls, led by Digital Catapult, a total of 13 projects have been awarded a grant. 6 projects were awarded a share of £1m for CR&D 1.
The projects represent a mix of early-stage and award-winning companies whose work is steadily gaining momentum. The projects explored a range of ambitious ideas addressing emerging challenges from across different areas of the Creative Industries. In collaboration with our globally recognised universities in the region, the project teams developed an exciting mix of innovative prototypes
Air Giants – Giant Tactile Robots
Air Giants are a creative robotics company making a new kind of giant (typically 5-10m) interactive soft robot using fabric, air, and computing.
Project details
Giant Tactile Robots will open up the space for interacting with soft robots, impacting the fields of Soft Robotics and Human-Computer Interaction. Giant tactile robots will be present in public art, in virtual reality, within the theme park industry, digital health and well-being, e.g. to create innovative sensory environments for children with special needs.
Condense – Cloud Compression for Live Volumetric Capture / Virtual Venues
Condense is a Bristol-based startup founded in 2019. It currently has 24 employees and is based at the Watershed where it has its own Metaverse Studio. Condense has developed a system for capturing and streaming live volumetric video into Game Engines.
Project details
This project will focus on:
- Novel methods that employ deep learning to improve compression efficiency.
- Enhanced architectures for delivering volumetric video content at variable bitrates.
- Integrating systems into the decoder which dynamically influence the bitrate based on bandwidth and device capability (updating the Unity and Unreal plugins so that they can cope with whatever compression methodology is adopted).
Celestial – Celestial Live
Formed in 2020, Celestial has grown from a small start-up to a thriving company with partners in several countries. At the beginning, the company owned just 20 drones, which they used to develop their craft, but after attracting investment over the last two years have increased their drone fleet to over 1000 which have been deployed to live shows in the UK, Australia.
Project details
As opposed to current pre-recorded drone animation Celestial Live will have drones that respond to performers in real-time enabling the expression of their music or dance through an immersive fusion of colour, scale and movement.
Sandbox Projects
As well as projects from Digital Catapult led calls we also have projects from Watershed’s Sandbox funding calls, where creative teams were each awarded £45,000 to build a prototype.
The first Sandbox call, ‘Playable City’ produced projects which place play at the heart of the city, sparking imagination and conversation about inclusion, sustainability, surveillance and the future of cities.
The second Sandbox Call ‘More than AI’ invited SMEs, artists, designers, technologists and creative practitioners to experiment creatively and propose new distinctive ideas responding to the theme of ‘More than AI’, recognising it as one of many diverse intelligences in our world.
Pyka – The Expression Orchestra
Collaborations with AI in areas like musical improv are in the moment, responsive and able to build on the joys of the offerings from those in the room. So can AI allow those who can’t play an instrument gain access to this musical experience? The Expression Orchestra comprises a collection of alternative, easy to use digital instruments designed to empower and broaden peoples’ access to musical performance primarily in educational settings, with a particular focus on SEN/D and ALN students. Sounds are created by a single point of interaction e.g roll, throw, press. Creators, Pyka, will explore how AI can make The Conductor, who sits at the centre of the experience, more capable of interpreting human interaction resulting in a richer musical expression for all.
Fellowship
Bauer Media and Splash & Ripple – Future Radio
Rosie Poebright is a story experience architect, digital artist and real-world game designer with a Doctorate in Audience Participation. They are a Watershed Fellow in Residence as part of the MyWorld Ideas programme, focusing on the Future of Radio with Bauer Media. Rosie will focus on conceptualising how the future of radio will layer into our everyday lives in a world shaped by AI and responsive technologies.
We are also fortunate enough to have technology on display from MyWorld partners, University of Bath and Bath Spa University.
CAMERA – University of Bath
The Centre for the Analysis of Motion, Entertainment Research and Applications (CAMERA) has been funded by the EPSRC and the University of Bath. It exists to accelerate the impact of fundamental research being undertaken at the University in the Departments of Computer Science, Health and Psychology. CAMERA performs world-leading research in Intelligent Visual and Interactive Technology, underpinned by academic and partner expertise across both core EPSRC research disciplines – Computer Vision, Graphics, Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and AI – as well expertise in healthcare, rehabilitation, biomechanics, musculoskeletal modelling, sports performance, and psychology.
The Studio – Bath Spa
The Studio in Bath is Bath Spa University’s award-winning city centre home for enterprise and innovation. We provide free and paid-for space for micro-businesses, Bath Spa University students, and graduates to work on projects and ideas that focus on creativity and technology.