Skip to content

UK Tech Festival Showcases Startups Using AI for Creative Industries

Posted 16 Oct 2023

UK tech festival showcases startups using AI for creative industries

A version of this blog originally appeared on Nvidia’s website, you can read the original version here.

At one of the UK’s largest technology festivals, top enterprises and startups are highlighting their latest innovations, hosting workshops and celebrating the growing tech ecosystem based in the country’s southwest. Bristol Technology Festival 2023 showcased the work of nine startups that recently participated in a MyWorld Challenge Call, led by Digital Catapult, in collaboration with NVIDIA.

The challenge, which ran for four months, supported companies in developing a prototype or extending an innovation that could transform experiences using reality capture, real-time collaboration and creation, or cross-platform content delivery.

This challenge was part of the MyWorld programme, an initiative for pioneering creative technology focused on cementing the West of England as a creative media powerhouse. Each selected startup was given £50,000 to help develop projects that foster the advancement of generative AI, digital twins and other groundbreaking technologies for use in creative industries.

Lux Aeterna Explores Generative AI for Visual Effects

Emmy Award-winning independent visual effects studio Lux Aeterna — which is using gen AI and neural networks for VFX production — deployed its funds to develop a generative AI-powered text-to-image toolkit for creating maps, or 2D images used to represent aspects of a scene, object or effect.

At the Bristol Technology Festival, Lux Aeterna demonstrated this technology, powered by NVIDIA RTX 40 Series GPUs, with a focus on its ability to generate parallax occlusion maps, a method of creating the effect of depth for 3D textured surfaces.

Lux Aeterna Explores Generative AI for Visual Effects

Meaning Machine Brings AI to Game Characters, Dialogue

Meaning Machine, a studio pioneering gameplay that uses natural language AI, used its funds from the challenge to develop a generative AI system for in-game characters and dialogue. Its Game Consciousness technology enables in-game characters to accurately talk about their world, in real time, so that every line of dialogue reflects the game developer’s creative vision.

Meaning Machine’s demo at today’s showcase invited attendees to experience its interrogation game, “Dead Meat,” in which players must chat with an in-game character — a murder suspect — with the aim of manipulating them into giving a confession.

A member of the NVIDIA Inception program for cutting-edge startups, Meaning Machine powers its generative AI technology for game development using the NVIDIA NeMo framework for building, customizing and deploying large language models.

Meaning Machine MyWorld Project Example May 2023

More Startups Showcase AI for Creative Industries

Additional challenge participants that hosted demos today at the Bristol Technology Festival include:

  • Black Laboratory, an NVIDIA Inception member demonstrating a live puppet-performance capture system, puppix, that can seamlessly transfer the physicality of puppets to digital characters.
  • IMPRESS, which is developing an AI-powered launchpad for self-publishing indie video games. It offers data-driven market research for game development, marketing campaign support, press engagement tools and more.
  • Larkhall, which is expanding Otto, its AI system that generates live, reactive visuals based on musical performances, as well as automatic, expressive captioning for speech-based performances.
  • Motion Impossible, which is building a software platform for centralized control of its AGITO systems — free-roaming, modular, camera dolly systems for filmmaking.
  • Zubr and Uninvited Guests, two companies collaborating on the development of augmented- and virtual-reality tools for designing futuristic urban environments.
MyWorld showcase