Audience of the Future roundtables: Gathering and assessing immersive audience insights

Immersive technologies have seen rapid evolution over the past few years, but at the same time there has been little in the way of establishing clear methodologies, best practices or guidance for the testing and development of immersive content and experiences.

For this roundtable, taking place on Wednesday 18 September, Digital Catapult is looking for the most innovative organisations to feed into and validate findings, explore audience testing and user experience methodologies applied to immersive technologies.

Participation in the roundtable will support Digital Catapult’s research into the approaches and techniques used to gather insights into immersive audiences. The activity is part of the Audience of the Future programme, and has a specific focus on user testing and audience research methodologies, as well as documenting insights from immersive practitioners who have previously run immersive productions.

Following inputs from the Audience of the Future demonstrators and other UK immersive content creators, this activity will further validate insights with the immersive community. This session is purely an exercise in evidence gathering – there will be no audience testing nor looking for content to test against at this stage.

This is part of a wider consultation that will feed into a published output later in the year. We will confirm participation and timings following assessment and the most relevant groupings based on organisation type and experience in this area.

Why you should get involved?

• There is no industry-wide audience insight gathering methodology, so this forum will begin to lay out best-practices and research in this area, providing a unique opportunity to help shape future guidelines
• With varied knowledge bases, the attendees will be able to gain new experiences and ideas to bring back to their own companies
• Participants will be able to feed into a growing body of work that explores audience insights across VR, AR and MR experiences
• As a thank you, attendees will receive recognition for providing their insights and time in final publication, as well as being one of the first to receive the paper

Who should apply?

This roundtable is of particular interest for those with a role in audience testing for immersive technologies including:

• Academics and other industry stakeholders who are exploring novel audience testing, user experience and audience identification techniques for VR, AR and MR
• Startups who are exploring novel audience testing, user experience and audience identification techniques for VR, AR and MR
• Experienced UX designers and testers that could apply their knowledge and learnings to the process
• Anyone showcasing, commissioning or creating immersive content to provide background and real-life scenarios and use cases

Attendees should be willing to present or discuss their work in an open forum.

About Audience of the Future

Audience of the Future Demonstrators is an £18 million programme funding four large scale immersive experiences tested with large audiences.

These projects are exploring four themes:

• Performance (A Royal Shakespeare-led project with 15 specialist organisations from across theatre, music, video production, gaming and research, coming together to stream live performances to people’s mobile phones and extended reality headsets)
• Sports (a consortium of ESL – the world’s largest e-sports content producer – academics and innovators, which will develop a new platform that uses gameplay data to transform how remote audiences experience sports)
• Visitor Experience (two new, multi-sensory, interactive worlds filled with dinosaurs and robots, in a project led by Factory 42 for London’s Natural History Museum and the Science Museum)
• Moving image (a consortium of Aardman, Tiny Rebel Games, digital specialists Potato, creative agency Sugar Potato and the University of South Wales, will take the characters from Wallace & Gromit into the future of storytelling)