A new partnership in Bristol and Bath is helping theatre, television, and computing companies test how audiences react to content delivered over limited internet connections. The problem is that streaming high-quality immersive content—such as virtual reality theatre or interactive TV—requires huge amounts of data. When networks are slow or congested, the experience degrades. This cluster brings together universities and creative businesses to understand exactly which technical trade-offs (such as compression artefacts or resolution changes) break a viewer’s sense of immersion, and which ones go unnoticed. If the research succeeds, it could give creative companies a practical toolkit for designing content that stays engaging even on bandwidth-constrained networks. That matters for live-streamed performances, remote collaboration in production, and any future platform where audiences expect a seamless experience. The cluster also aims to train a new generation of talent and attract inward investment, with the goal of making the Bristol and Bath region an internationally recognised hub for creative technology by 2030.
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The Bristol + Bath Creative Industries Cluster [(B+B)XR+D] is a new partnership designed to improve the performance of the Creative Industries in the Bristol & Bath region. The partners are UWE, Bristol, Watershed, and the Universities of Bath, Bristol and Bath Spa, working with a range of industry partners from Television, Theatre, and Computing. The Bristol + Bath Creative Industries Cluster will support its business partners in finding new ways to engage the audiences of the future in new market places. Our R&D-led productions will lead the cluster into the future, engaging with emergent technologies, boosting inward investment and developing a new talent base to lead the cluster's creative industries in the next ten years. Our core proposition is partnering with industry in understanding user engagement in new platforms. Next generation content delivery methods must preserve the immersive properties of content as perceived by humans when transmitted over bandlimited networks. We will mobilise the cluster research base to support businesses in improving their performance through projects that exploit the new relationships between content type, acquisition format, format parameters, coding artefacts, user environment and engagement.The (B+B)XR+D programme is designed to offer many points of contact and collaboration for industry partners that will produce several different kinds of impact for a range of different service users, participants, companies and individuals. Our goal is to lay the foundations for the Bristol + Bath cluster to be internationally successful by 2030.
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