Immerse yourself - Audiences of the Future

In the creative industries, delivering the right proposition to the audience is critical.

But what will your audience of the future look like?

Maybe they already exist and you have to consider new ways to keep them engaged rather than see them drift off into other things.

Maybe they don’t even exist yet and you’re hoping whatever new development you’re pinning your hopes to will be the thing that lands them.

Perhaps new technologies will open up new avenues of engagement?

If this is familiar or enticing, then there is funding and financial support available for your business to develop and explore the opportunities for using immersive technologies to engage audiences across the creative industries.

Called Audiences of the Future, this £1m competition from Innovate UK will help fund early stage, human centred design to understand customer needs. Specifically, it is to help shape and create new or better ideas for:

· immersive audience experiences across the creative industries
· products or services used to create, deliver and experience immersive content across the creative industries

So what might that cover? What sort of projects are eligible? Well so long as you are a UK registered business, you can apply for anything that falls within the following areas.

You might consider yourself wishing to explore the very nature of immersive experiences. For instance, how can the state of the art be advanced with immersive audience experiences that are desirable and fit for purpose?

Or perhaps you’re concerned with creating and distributing immersive content. It might be looking at how you make the production of high quality content cheaper, faster and more accessible.

Alternatively you could focus on hardware and how to improve the physical devices through which audiences will experience immersive content, such as eye-wear, controllers or haptic feedback devices.

Or you may be interested in the development and design of new digital platforms and services through which audiences will access immersive content.

At its core this project has to be about understanding human experience, not technological development. And it must be focused on applications within the creative industries in the UK.

As these are short projects, up to 6 months in duration, with an application deadline of July 4th, there’s no better time to explore the opportunity and get ahead of the game.

View the recorded video from the briefings here

Get more detail at apply-for-innovation-funding.service.gov.uk/competition/151/overview or speak to Jake Larsson at KTN for help in your application.