TechNExt 2025 - Immersive Hub
Is XR driving a revolution in patient care? - Tammy Vivian, Vikki Rand & Denis Martin
Tammy Vivian is from GigXR which was a spinoff of Pearson publishing, they needed to make an application to improve patient care without stepping foot in a hospital. They want to drive outcomes such as student satisfaction and return on investment as in healthcare mannequins and role play is used so want to make sure are at least achieving same outcomes with simulations. They work with lecturers and more to make sure simulations are clinically accurate. GigXR simulations are hyper-realistic and on Microsoft HoloLens, Meta Quest 3/3S and iOS / Android to revolutionise clinical skills training and help with urgency and compassion to a virtual patient as well with XR and emotional connection.
GigXR also have other powerful strategic alliances such as with the US Army, Epi-Brain Collaboration with Alaska Native Tribal Consortium along with academic partnerships where work directly with hospitals and universities to customise training modules that address specific educational needs and clinical requirements. They have had good feedback from partners such as Miami Dade College, Ursuline College and Southern Cross University. Their immersive XR app platform includes HoloPatient, HoloScenarios and Insight Series and will have Conversational AI and HoloHuman+.
Professor Vikki Rand is Director of the National Horizons Centre at Teesside University and is part of NortHFutures which is a three-year pilot project and supported by six universities in the region to tackle challenges in the region, they also facilitate digital skills sharing across different areas of health. They prioritise community centred research and facilitate widening participation in digital research and design innovation by diverse stakeholders. They are networking for innovation and entrepreneurship. PROTO is one of those places they work with which is a home for innovation and digital disruption. There are also companies like XR Therapeutics to use immersive tech to support mental health to be either patient or therapist. They also work with 5G Immersive Lab which offers a 5G test bed and Immersive technology along with Tucan Studio for VR and XR including gamification.
Denis Martin is professor of rehabilitation at Teesside University and worked with consortium for funding VR4Rehab, VR4Long Covid and to scale up 4Rehab. The project ran with hackathons, game jams and challenges. Things which came from them include Corpus VR which is new direction for existing products to use VR to help understand pain neuroscience. They worked with existing services to add a new dimension to what they deliver using XR including The Pain Toolkit Café for a virtual space to meet together and share resources and they also worked with a company to share the tips and experiences with pain.
Breaking Barriers - Unlocking the Power of Immersive Technologies - Harvey Trent, Richard Laing, Craig Gilchrist & Ashmita Randhawa
Harvey Trent is director at Fuzzy Logic studios which builds AR and VR in North Shields and their core goal is to build talent in the North East. There are numerous different challenges to unlock power of immersive tech. The tech is great and what it is doing, and they need to stay current to see how it will be applied in the commercial space. VR and AR have been around for a while but there are still challenges. People don't understand how to use it or don't know what resources are required and need to manage change when bringing in new tech and then what cost category does it fall under and is the application for the business along with that return on investment does it show. Dealing with a perceived risk and no budget allocation, you need to put this tech in your profit and loss. The technology is there, and it is advancing. What is the right question, so what if, what if your competitor does it instead. What if...
Professor Richard Laing part of Urban Futures from Northumbria University spoke about where VR and AR has become normalised at a rapid pace. VR and AR in the build environment where can use laser scanners which can capture version of real environment that previously would be impossible to capture. No one is saying to abandon pencils and pens but can use versions of things on the screen as often start with simple drawings. It is becoming increasingly normal to use large screens for architecture and design process which will often help notice things that may have been missed otherwise. It is normal on construction sites to have large or small screens along with augmented reality on site to see what something is supposed to look like when it is finished. Conversation teams can use information to help with building conversation and have a depth of information that can be conveyed in a virtual way.
Craig Gilchrist is CTO of BeamXR which brings things from inside XR to outside XR. They have a particular love of XR and people using it for the first time. Observability of XR, you can know to some extent what XR game someone is playing by how they move their arms. XR is immersive, emotive and social but a black box to anyone on the outside. They saw issues and heard issues with attempts to solve this so was the spark to starting BeamXR and Meta had their own solution which doesn't work well such as with conference Wi-Fi. They thought about gaming first as there is a lot of game streaming already but streaming VR has a lot more potential and there is a lot more from just a flat game so they want to bridge the gap. They chose gaming as it has demanding and passionate gamers then they can bring this into and scale with enterprise.
BeamXR turns a standalone headset into a streaming studio and allow developers to set the narrative where can change participant into a presenter with controllable camera angles and more. BeamXR have features where viewers can see things and in VR you can see chat messages from viewers. You can open up your experience and take them on your journey such as social simulations. They have learned that physical presence drives social etiquette, empathy drives performance and observation changes behaviour. The barrier is to scale and bring into existing e-learning platforms and can elevate experience and deliver greater communication and presence and visibility makes people more effective and human.
Virtual Sustainability: Energy Monitoring in the world of Virtual Production - Laura Partridge, Vicki Williams, Phil Adlam & Paul Dolan
Laura Partridge is Associate Director for CoSTAR which is the UK R&D network for creative technology. It aims to focus on huge role creative has on UK economy with focus on screen sector. It is a five-year programme with five labs in the UK. It seeks to address a lot of challenges, the UK is great at screen such as gaming, film and TV but where challenge is keeping on top of technology such as from gaming being applied to TV and film and support SMEs who might not have access to infrastructure and keep them ahead of the curve. Environmental sustainability for virtual production has an impact on energy so need to use R&D to help resolve this.
Dr Vicky Williams is Policy Manager at CoSTAR Foresight Lab which looks at what challenges there will be in the future. Their job is to think about implications of research about what policy interventions will be needed from the government and start to think about taking existing strengths and sustainability is a huge part of this. There are labs around the country that ForesightLab which tracks industry insights is one with others including RealtimeLab, NationalLab which is development at Pinewood Studios, ScreenLab and LiveLab. They talked about that they collect data across labs to get a broad picture of what is happening including lab research on key thematic areas in sustainability for technology and convergence. AI will have a massive impact and challenge for screen sector. They are also running a survey with businesses across the UK to try and understand what is happening on a national level. Foresight Lab is about understanding of plausible and preferred futures.
Phil Adlam who is CTO of CoSTAR LiveLab talked about Carbon insights with assessment of carbon impact and energy consumption across virtual production, generative AI and more. Virtual production is more sustainable but there are gaps such as what sort of energy sources are powering screens and how excess heat is being redirected so need to have transparency of data. There is a need to bring sectors together to reduce data gaps. There have been reports on AI in screen sector where virtual production will increasingly use generative AI so need to look at this in terms of sustainability goals. In the screen sector there is lack of transparency for sustainability and AI along with using smaller more bespoke AI models rather than larger AI models. Need to think about present challenges including copyright for AI and to be a world leader need to think about sustainability. In terms of future is thinking about creator led and responsible use of technology.
They have been doing work to make sure are feeding into policies or learning from overseas projects that have sustainability at the core. Each of labs are based on places of industry. The key part has been collaboration between academia and industry. There are all sorts of elements in creative industry and it is key to collect all sorts of data, most sustainability data is being captured for reporting but also want to know how to get better so is helpful to have data and put it into context such as understanding what power is used for such as whether it is being used for things that are useful or not. It is possible to take data and use generative AI to create actionable insights. They have been able to demonstrate that virtual production does reduce carbon footprint and by applying knowledge learned reduce average consumption of energy. CoSTAR is partnering with real world challenges and solutions and want to help people with this.
Dr Paul Dolan got money to work with Proto and have looked into the environmental concerns with virtual production and there were some gaps in knowledge research such as manufacturing and materials for LED screens but there are lots of them being built in the UK. With virtual production what kind of computation is happening is another question such as how images are being produced and stored. There is a huge reliance on data centre compute, but the infrastructure is terrible for the environment such as water supply which is a huge burden on water. Real-time rendering happens on site rather than a data centre.