Audience of the Future

Focal Point VR part of winning Audience of the Future Consortium

Focal Point VR is delighted to announce that it is a member of the WEAVR consortium which has won one of 4 large UK Research and Innovation funded Audience of the Future demonstrator competitions.

What is WEAVR?

WEAVR is a new non-linear social viewing platform designed for live events. WEAVR uses real time data to drive storytelling, weaving together disparate data sources with deep AI and using immersive technologies to create a multi-layered, hyper personalized, interactive viewing experience.

Audience of the Future

Imagine being inside the world of your favourite stage performance or watching your favourite athletes every move with enhanced stats for the entire match, or immersed with others, solving a detective narrative involving dinosaurs and robots in a national museum or shopping centre.

This will become a reality for UK audiences from 2019 as globally renowned IP, storytellers and technology companies come together to demonstrate cutting edge immersive experiences thanks to funding through the government’s industrial strategy.

The £18 million total investment of government and industry funding is a key element of the Audience of the Future programme, delivered by UK Research and Innovation and announced by government in March 2018 in the Creative Industries Sector Deal. It is comprised of £12 million government grant funding through the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund and £6 million from industry.

The awards will be made across the areas of Sports Entertainment, Visitor Experience and Performance. The demonstrators will be tested at scale with 100,000 users to evidence the business models behind them.

 

WEAVR Consortium wins Sports Entertainment Demonstrator

Esports – video games that are played competitively and watched by massive audiences – has the fastest growing global audience for live sports. In 2017 over 388 million people worldwide watched esports, and the number of esports fans is projected to grow a further 50% by 2020.

Our consortium will produce a new platform called WEAVR that leverages the data-rich environment of esports to transform the way esports – and further down the line physical sports – are experienced through cross reality technologies by remote audiences.

The WEAVR consortium includes ESL UK, REWIND, Cybula, Dock 10 and the University of York as well as Focal Point VR. The team includes leading academics and innovators across immersive technologies, data-driven content production and broadcast. WEAVR will transform the experiences of millions of esports fans, generate new audiences and open up new revenue streams for the broadcast entertainment industry.


Being part of the winning WEAVR consortium represents a huge vote of confidence in the technology and strategic direction that Focal Point VR have pursued.

We will be looking for new investment and new partnerships as we take our 8K+ 360 live streaming technology and products deeper into esports and physical sports future broadcasting.

Focal Point VR will also be hiring additional engineers to augment the existing team as we take on the additional workload of the WEAVR integrations and demonstrations.

The official WEAVR Launch Press Release can be found here.