The Centre for the Analysis of Motion, Entertainment Research and Applications (CAMERA) will build on and extend existing impactful relationships between leading researchers at the University of Bath supported by investment from the University, from external partners and with the close participation of Bath's EPSRC Doctoral Training Centre for Digital Entertainment (CDE). Building on existing expertise in Applied Visual Technology and closely linked with the CDE, CAMERA will draw on knowledge, skills and outputs across multi-disciplinary research areas. These include Computer Vision, Graphics, Motion-Capture, Human-Computer Interaction, Biomechanics and Healthcare, underpinned by a strong portfolio of DE research funding from RCUK and other funders. CAMERA will deliver Applied Visual Technology into our partners companies and their industries, to achieve high economic, societal and cultural impact. Bath leads the UK in innovative creative industry research and training for post-graduates through our CDE, which is contractually partnered with 35 innovative UK companies. Growing from our established core strength in the area of Visual Technology - capturing, modelling and visualising the real world - and our strong historical foundation of entertainment-delivered research, CAMERA will focus on high-impact work in movies, TV visual vffects (VFX) and video games with partners at the The Imaginarium and The Foundry, two of the world's leading visual entertainment companies. This focused collaboration will push the boundaries of technology in the area of human motion capture, understanding and animation, and artist driven visual effects production, feeding into our existing CDE partnerships. From this strong foundation, we will extend and apply visual technology to new areas of high economic, societal and cultural impact within the digital economy theme. These include Human Performance Enhancement, with partners in British Skeleton and BMT Defence Services; and Health, Rehabilitation and Assistive Technologies, with partners in the Ministry of Defence. CAMERA is well placed to lead the application of Visual Technology in these new directions: Bath researchers have helped athletes to win 15 Olympic and World Championship medals in the last 10 years and have contributed significantly to national efforts in integrating ex-soldiers with disabilities into civilian life.

StoryFutures Academy is a genuine HEI-Industry collaboration between trainers and producers to develop the storytelling techniques and languages that will shape the future of immersive narrative. Led by the National Film & Television School and Royal Holloway, our bid is founded on research and training knowledge that places storytelling at its heart. We will provide core screen sector talent with the tools, space, creative freedom and cross-sector work structures to unlock the creative and commercial potential of immersive production. Partnered by Sir Lenny Henry, Destiny Ekaragha, Alex Garland, Georgina Campbell and more we will lead a charge of UK creative talent into immersive that embeds diversity into the development of the medium across writing, directing, producing, performance, cinematography, editing, animation and VFX. We will deliver training in action, providing opportunities for creatives to learn through taking part in immersive productions that tackle key creative and technical challenges. We link this to R&D in business model innovation and audience insight that combines electronic engineering, neuro- and cognitive psychology with long-sighted ethnography to provide a catalyst for growth of creative industries. We de-risk immersive production through 4 workstreams that provide £1.25m for collaborative projects with immediate impact: 1. Embedded Placements: Promoting talent development and commercial vitality by enabling placements of screen sector talent on immersive productions for cross sector innovation and work-based learning; 2. Collaborative Co-productions: Co-producing immersive experiences that tackle sector wide creative and technological barriers to growth, upskilling core screen sector workers via access to hands-on learning on live productions that build a cross-sector talent pool; 3. Experimental Labs: R&D-based productions that expose core screen sector talent partners to immersive and push technological and creative boundaries; 4. Developmental Training: Training a next generation of immersive storytellers and trainers that cascades knowledge to HEIs, FECs and industry across the country. We are unique in our industry credibility and relationships. The NFTS was awarded the BAFTA for Outstanding British Contribution to Cinema in 2018, and it is the only institution in the UK where industry already invest over £1.5m annually in CPD level training courses, enabling us access and partnership with internationally renowned on- and off-screen talent. Our partners are world-leaders in how story and new technologies combine to produce compelling and novel immersive experiences, including immersive theatre (Punchdrunk), VR (Rewind), gaming (Sony IE), film (BFI), television (Sky VR), advertising (McCann) visual effects (The Third Floor, Double Negative), performance capture (Imaginarium). We bring them together with advanced Original Equipment Manufacturers (Microsoft, Plexus) and sector experts (Digital Catapult) to place story and technology in tandem to explore, research, train and develop cross sector storytelling talent and business models. SFA will create over 60 ICE productions and generate nearly 1,000 direct beneficiaries. It will cascade benefits, insights and opportunities via collaborations with regional partners, including NFTS' base in Scotland alongside TRC Media and UK Games Fund as well as access to nationwide labs via Digital Catapult, and co-production bases in Manchester (McCann) and Yorkshire (BFI). It also gains significant advantage from the economies of scale and access to talent achievable from our Gateway Cluster base with its easy flows of talent and work in and out of London. StoryFutures Academy can make the UK a world-leader in immersive because it has unmatched access to mainstream creative screen sector talent, companies and technologies, allowing it to translate experimentation, training and R&D into tangible economic and creative ROI for the whole of UK Plc.

The strategic objective of this platform grant is to underpin Audio-Visual Media Research within the Centre for Vision, Speech and Signal Processing (CVSSP) to pursue fundamental research combining internationally leading expertise in understanding of real-world audio and visual data, and to transfer this capability to impact new application domains. Our goal is to pioneer new technologies which impact directly on industry practice in healthcare, sports, retail, communication, entertainment and training. This builds on CVSSP's unique track-record of world-leading research in both audio and visual machine perception which has enabled ground-breaking technology exploited by UK industry. The strategic contribution and international standing of the centres research in audio and visual media has been recognised by EPSRC through two previous platform grant awards (2003-14) and two programme grant awards in 2013 and 2015. Platform Grant funding is requested to reinforce the critical mass of expertise and knowledge of specialist facilities required to contribute advance in both fundamental understanding and pioneering new technology. In particular this Platform Grant will catalyse advances in multi-sensory machine perception building on the Centre's unique strengths in audio and vision. Key experienced post-doctoral researchers have specialist knowledge and practical know-how, which is an important resource for training new researchers and for maintaining cutting edge research using state-of-the-art facilities. Strategically the Platform Grant will build on recent independent advances in audio and visual scene analysis to lead multi-sensory understanding and modelling of real-world scenes. Research advances will provide the foundation for UK industry to lead the development of technologies ranging from intelligent sensing for healthcare and assisted living to immersive entertainment production. Platform Grant funding will also strengthen CVSSP's international collaboration with leading groups world-wide through extended research secondments US (Washington, USC), Asia (Tsinghua, Tianjin, Kyoto, Tokyo, KAUST) and Europe (INRIA, MPI, Fraunhofer, ETH, EPFL, KTH, CTU, UPF).

The stories of tomorrow will reach audiences in new and complex ways, fuelled by immersive technologies, data-driven personalisation, smart devices and AI alongside evolutions in contemporary screen form. Screen industries' creative story processes, techniques, business models, value networks and workflows are thus challenged to iterate a next generation of storytelling that can engage audiences in novel and commercially viable experiences. We span screen and createch industries, converging world leaders in storytelling, including Double Negative, Punchdrunk, nDreams, Sony, Pinewood, BBC Worldwide, HTC Vive and the BFI, to work alongside SMEs. We match these with academic expertise traversing story form (Media, Gaming, Drama); audience behaviour (Psychology); business models (Management); production cultures (Media); hardware, software and user interfaces (Engineering, Comp Sci, Design), to facilitate R&D that will create innovative and compelling content, products and service for emerging creative technologies. StoryFutures will grow both screen and createch industries. Led by an innovative StoryLab model, we work across 4 themes: T1 StoryLab; T2 Value Networks; T3 Data in the Creative Workflow; T4 Audience Engagement. Our StoryLab (T1) provides expertise and space for collaborative approaches to creative challenges that are barriers to business growth, such as how to increase user comfort in VR, build social immersive experiences or novel exploitation of existent IP. It will operate at professional and student level, spanning FE, HE and CPD, training a next generation of storytellers and entrepreneurs in world-class creative content and products. StoryLab will develop, fund and support prototype and risky innovations in story form that tackle such challenges, providing SMEs with new business opportunities and access to further funding and mentoring (T2). SF's R&D programme links these innovative productions with R&D on the effective management of data in the creative production pipeline, enabling more efficient and creative workflows (T3). And, via our partner distribution platforms (HTC, Heathrow, BFI, Sky VR), tests next gen experiences with audiences in novel ways that produce rich understandings of their engagement, including cognitive and neurological responses linked to a long-range analysis of youth audiences' preferences in these new spaces (T4). Across this work we will grow revenues and jobs in our region and beyond. With over £6.7m in leverage funding, SF is led by Royal Holloway together with its industry partners and HEIs, Brunel, NFTS and University of Creative Arts. SF spans film, television, gaming and immersion across a regional cluster that forms a gateway in and out of London. It will connect the film studios in the region's north to Guildford's gaming in the south, across to the west's plethora of createch companies and back to London's intensity of creative industries (see map). The cluster thus emphasises the region's - and UK economy's - fusion of digital and creative skills, with such companies likely to be 'more productive and have higher growth rates than [those] located entirely in one discipline' (Bazalgette 2017: 14). The region contains nearly 20% of the UK's high concentration, high growth creative Travel to Work Areas, forming the highest proportion of creative jobs and businesses outside of London. Within the cluster Heathrow constitutes "a critical driver of the area's economy" (TVBerkshire, 2017) as well as a gateway to the global markets and audiences that our innovative products and services must reach. SF will address a significant challenge for the UK creative economy in sustaining creative conurbations that have the potential for 'higher levels of business productivity' than Creative Cities (Nesta, 2016: 6). The Gateway Cluster thus has potential to form a powerhouse akin to the 'Golden Triangle' of medical research, industrial collaboration and innovation to its immediate north.

The digital games industry has global revenues of $65bn (in 2011) predicted to grow to $82bn by 2017. The UK is a major player, whose position at third internationally (behind the US and Japan) is under threat from China, South Korea and Canada. The £3bn UK market for games far exceeds DVD and movie box office receipts and music sales. Driven by technology advances, the industry has to reinvent itself every five years with the advent of new software, interaction and device technologies. The influential 2011 Nesta "Next Gen" review of the skills needs of the UK Games and Visual Effects industry found that more than half (58%) of video games employers report difficulties in filling positions with recruits direct from education and recommended a substantial strengthening of games industry-university research collaboration. IGGI will create a sustainable centre which will provide the ideal mechanism to consolidate the scientific, technical, social, cultural and cognitive dimensions of gaming, ensuring that the industry benefits from a cohort of exceptional research-trained postgraduates and harnessing research-led innovation to ensure that the UK remains at the forefront of innovation in digital games. The injection of 55+ highly qualified PhD graduates and their associated research projects will transform the way the games industry works with the academic community in the UK. IGGI will provide students with a deep grounding in the core technical and creative skills needed to design, develop and deliver a game, as well as training in the scientific, social, therapeutic and cultural possibilities offered by the study of games and games players. Throughout their PhDs the students will participate in practical industrial workshops, intensive game development challenges and a yearly industrialy-facing symposium. All students will undertake short- and longer-term placements with companies that develop and use games. These graduates will push the frontiers of research in interaction, media, artificial intelligence (AI) and computational creativity, creating new game-themed research areas at the boundaries of computer science and economics, sociology, biology, education, robotics and other fields. The two core themes of IGGI are: Intelligent Games - increasing the flow of intelligence from research into digital games. We will use research advances to seed the creation of a new generation of more intelligent and engaging digital games, to underpin the distinctiveness and growth of the UK games industry. The study of intelligent games will be underpinned by new business models and research advances in data mining (game analytics) which can exploit vast volumes of gameplay data. Game Intelligence - increasing the use of intelligence from games to achieve scientific and social goals. Analysis of gameplay data will allow us to understand individual behaviour and preference on a hitherto impossible scale, making games into a powerful new tool to achieve scientific and societal goals. We will work with user groups and the games industry to produce new genres of games which can yield therapeutic, educational and social benefits and use games to seed a new era of scientific experimentation into human behaviour, preference and interaction, in economics, sociology, psychology and human-computer-interaction. The IGGI CDT will provide a major advance in an area of great importance to the UK economy and massive impact on society. It will provide training for the leaders of the next generation of researchers, developers and entrepreneurs in digital games, forging economic growth through a distinctly innovative and research-engaged UK games industry. IGGI will massively boost the notion of digital games as a tool for scientific research and societal good.