Digital Catapult’s Augmentor Programme Reveals 10 new XR Startups

Augmentor - Digital Catapult

Now in its fourth year, during the summer Digital Catapult’s Augmentor programme announced an open call for UK-based XR startups. They’ve now been chosen, selecting 10 companies working across the immersive industry spectrum, from training platforms to augmented reality (AR) books.

Fracture Reality

They will now begin a 12-week programme to help grow their products and enhance their business model, meeting and learning from leading industry mentors and investors to attract more financing in a bid to scale.

The teams selected for the 2020 Augmentor programme are:

  • Emperia – “Is creating virtual reality experiences that boost sales and customer engagement for businesses in art and luxury fashion.”
  • Evidential – “Has produced EVITA, an incident training platform which provides large scale environments where multiple training scenarios can take place.”
  • Fracture Reality – “Developing an online mixed reality platform called Join specifically for engineering and data-intensive users that includes immersive 3D features like gestural sketching and avatars.”
  • MagicBeans – “It has developed Roundhead, a platform for creating and delivering six degrees of freedom spatial audio experiences at scale, so users can create, share and listen to spatial audio across multiple devices.”
  • MOONHUB – “Has created a high quality, immersive training product which uses virtual reality to convert e-learning solutions into interactive training scenarios to improve engagement in employee training.”
  • Overview Ark – “Created a tool for production designers and event coordinators to build 1:1 replicas of a live show without the need of programming knowledge.”
  • Percept Imagery – “Developed a unique augmented reality platform called Sprie that enables retailers to personalise online shopping experiences by allowing shoppers to try products in the real world before buying them.”
  • Retinize – “An award-winning content studio based in Belfast, Northern Ireland, that specialises in the creation of cutting edge immersive VR content as well as interactive and geolocative AR applications.”
  • Slanted Theory – “Through the power of 3D technology (XR) and immersive analytics, Slanted Theory has created “Alaira”, a cloud data analysis and visualisation platform which provides views of data unparalleled in 2D dashboards.”
  • VIKA Books – “Using augmented reality to promote British Sign Language (BSL) as a language for deaf and hearing children alike.”
Vika Books - Baby BSL
Image Credit: Jo Hounsome

“At a time when access to entertainment venues is restricted, online shopping has soared, and remote collaboration for work is more important than ever before as many of us remain working from home for the foreseeable future, this year’s Augmentor cohort are providing innovative, commercially viable solutions to issues that are important to us all,” said Jessica Driscoll, Head of Technology – Immersive at Digital Catapult in a statement. “What’s more, because Augmentor has always been about bringing investors and industry along for the journey, the teams see tangible results, from business support all the way to investment. We’ll be watching the next three months very closely and look forward to seeing the results.” 

In the past three years, 27 companies have taken part in Digital Catapult’s initiative, helping them raise a combined total of over £6.7 million GBP. These have included Somewhere Else which developed soft skills training platform BodySwaps, so it’s always worth keeping an eye on participants for the next big thing. For further updates, keep reading VRFocus.

Bristol’s Upcoming Immersive Showcase to Display VR Prototype’s From Triangular Pixels & Anagram

Next week in Bristol, UK, the South West Creative Technology Network Immersion Showcase (SWCTN) will bring together eight tech pioneers to display the future of immersive technology. Of these eight prototypes, two will use virtual reality (VR) while another will utilise augmented reality (AR).

Smash Hit Plunder
Smash Hit Plunder

The first of these comes from Triangular Pixels – the team behind Unseen Diplomacy and Smash Hit Plunder – in the form of  Responsive Content Generation Tools. This suite of tools is designed to make VR content faster and more efficient to make, whilst also allowing VR players to adapt content to their individual needs. This is especially useful for VR gamers with disabilities, allowing videogames to adapt to users rather than the other way around. For the showcase Triangular Pixels will be demoing content created by the tools, allowing visitors to see how the software adapts to the space its played in.

Then there’s the Realtime Stagemaker Toolkit from Anagram. This prototype project is actually two components. Starting with the Realtime Stagemaker Toolkit, a Unity plug-in, the software allows for the real-time manipulation of assets by the entire team. Followed by an artistic VR experience called The End is the Beginning, produced in collaboration with the Freud Museum, where participants lie on a virtual version of Freud’s couch.

“Immersion is a slippery process. Right now its one of those creative ideas that means different things to everyone. And that’s just great, because it’s a space full of possibility,” said Jon Dovey, SWCTN Project Director, in a statement. “I can see two strands at work. One is about a complete whole-body experience of being surrounded by content in, for instance, immersive theatre, art installations, and dance floors; the other where these kinds of wraparound sensory experience are industrially re-constituted through various forms of technology – notably virtual reality, but also augmented and mixed realities.”

“The basic design principle for our immersion theme has been that the industrial and creative development of the newly emergent platforms might be driven by talent with expertise in existing forms of immersion,” he continues. “We wanted to know how storytellers, theatre, filmmakers and artists might work with technologists to keep the field of immersion open and fresh; not stuck forever into a sweaty box attached to the front of your head.”

As for the AR prototype, this is the work of VIKA Books. Called Baby BSL: Where is the Bird?, this project is an AR book combining illustrations, videos, print and smartphone tech to inspire families to use British Sign Language (BSL).

The SWCTN Immersive Showcase takes place on 12th July 2019, at the Watershed in Bristol. For any further updates keep reading VRFocus.