Digital Catapult and Arts Council England launched CreativeXR back in 2018 to provide funds, tools and other assistance for those working on virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) projects. The programme has proven to be a success, returning for the third year with new contributors.
For 2020 CreativeXR has been awarded an Epic Megagrant by Epic Games which will be used to support up to five projects built using Epic’s Unreal Engine. The second new contributor is StoryFutures Academy which will mentor up to four companies in story development, design and continuing narrative.
“Now in its third year, we’re excited by the worldwide acclaim CreativeXR projects are attaining globally. Our brilliant partnership with Arts Council England continues to allow us to help 20 production companies a year take risks to uncover new ways of telling stories and try out new commercial models,” said Jeremy Silver, CEO, Digital Catapult in a statement. “This year we’re delighted to partner with Epic Games and StoryFutures Academy; together we are paving the way to develop the new immersive formats of the future, making the UK the best place in the world to produce creative immersive content.”
Applications have now opened for companies and teams interested in taking part, the deadline for applications being 17th April 2020. Having helped 40 teams receive funding to develop prototypes over the last two years CreativeXR has become a pivotal accelerator programme offering access to workshops and peer-to-peer learning, whilst also hosting an annual Showcase and Market event attended by global companies such as HTC Vive, Oculus, Bose and Intel for teams to pitch their work.
“We’re delighted to be partnering with CreativeXR for the second consecutive year, this time as the Storytelling Partner. As the UK’s National Centre for Immersive Storytelling, we are aligned with the vision of CreativeXR, and believe that great stories are fundamental to the success of the next wave of immersive experiences,” said Rebecca Gregory-Clarke, Head of Immersive, StoryFutures Academy: the National Centre for Immersive Storytelling.
As in previous years once 20 projects have been selected to take part in the CreativeXR programme VRFocus will let you know who made the cut.
“Augmentor has been instrumental in supporting new and early-stage VR/AR startups in the UK,” comments Dave Haynes, Director of Vive X Europe. “It’s been a pleasure to mentor many of the companies, helping them prepare to meet their first investors. This led to HTC leading an investment in KageNova last year through our Vive X program.”
First off, I was of course very happy to see a strong UK presence, which included content from Sky, the 
On the more stand-alone end, the BBC and Anagram’s 
This is in part reflective of the different audiences that producers are making a play for. Whilst the latter is probably more friendly to a wider user base, and is likely to have online distribution as it’s ultimate goal, the former is perhaps better suited to the kind of highly motivated, spectacle-seeking audiences who willingly seek out obscure locations and part with (often significant) amounts of money to spend an evening locked in an Escape Room with some people they hopefully like. Of course, they both have their merits and challenges – one suffers from a lack of installed user-base, and the other is challenged by the investment and logistical headaches to overcome in order to run an installation at significant scale.
This brings us to an interesting, if not entirely new, debate; are we creating art, or are we creating an entertainment business? And more to the point, can we have both? This conversation stretches into all corners of the creative world, of course, but it is an interesting one to be having at this stage of our immersive evolution. If we are focussing more on commercial sustainability, then certainly we can afford to be a lot more ruthless about working out where there are
