Rewind 22 years and immersive media experiences were firmly in the domain of location based services, and a select handful of academic and commercial R&D labs. A visionary in the Independent Television Commission’s Technology Group saw the future then though and, with EU collaborative R&D funding, embarked on an innovative and future focused programme of research targeted at understanding human responses to immersive media experiences, with the goal of developing tools to inform their optimisation.
This enabled us to immerse ourselves in all things measurement around UX of immersive media, and resulted in our development of the ITC-Sense of Presence Inventory. You can read about the development of our most used measure of user experience in immersive media in other places on i2’s website. The ITC-SOPI was developed out of a multi-method approach to the evaluation of user experience of immersive media (mainly in i2’s Founder, Prof Jonny Freeman’s PhD). 17 years after we published the measure, supported along the way with funding and networking from the EU framework programmes for collaborative R&D, commercial work, i2’s own R&D investment, and academic and R&D funding from UK sources (including Innovate UK), the measure has been licensed to over 500 labs worldwide (academic and commercial) and cited over 800 times in the literature.
We’re very excited to be heading to SXSW 2018 in Austin, Texas courtesy of EU@SXSW to promote the new Immersive UX Evaluation services we now offer to content creators, stakeholders and funders.
Also featuring in our demos and talks at SXSW will be our connected retail platform, Flashy, which we’ve blogged about before. A chunk of the founding research for Flashy was conducted in EU FP5, FP6 and FP7 projects (the latest including the Mindsee project: http://mindsee.eu/) and the proof of concept we’ll be demonstrating was funded by Innovate UK (in the Mindscape project, 2015-2016). Flashy gives retailers richer than ever insight into shopper behaviour in-store, and gives shoppers passive browse histories of physical retail outlets and Flash sales and communications on their smart devices. We’ll be demoing it live in Austin!
Come and say hi at Palm Door on Sixth in Austin, from Saturday March 10 until Monday March 12 2018. For more information, see: http://euinaustin.org/meet-our-startups/