Realtime and virtual graphical environments have been evolving with increasing speed over the last decade. As consumers we are becoming increasingly familiar with high fidelity virtualisation in film/TV and animation, video games and virtual reality. We have seen these techniques and technologies migrate from highly specialised and experimental uses to mainstream adoption and application. The use of these techniques in mainstream film and high-end theatre production has accelerated technological innovation and application across a broad range of motion and performance capture, real-time graphics processing, network and telecoms, edge computing in content and experience creation for entertainment media and live events. At the heart of these innovation is the development of real-time integration technologies primarily used for the creation of video games. Game engine technologies such as Unreal Engine and Unity are designed to integrate dynamic graphical environments with events and environmental effects in real time. For the last 5 years R&D-led growth and innovation in these areas has been driven through the AHRC Creative Industries Clusters InGAME in Dundee and Creative Informatics in Edinburgh. Both programmes have established strong, trusted networks and effective processes for driving demand led R&D into commercialised products. The CoSTAR Realtime Lab to be based in Water's Edge studio complex in Dundee and ECA in Edinburgh will bring together video games development expertise in Dundee's globally significant games cluster with world leading applied R&D at Abertay University and film, television and animation production in Edinburgh with University of Edinburgh's world leading expertise in machine learning and artificial intelligence. The CoSTAR Realtime Lab will deliver close-to-market innovation for digital productivity tools, creative production pipelines and content creation processes. The project will also bring together the existing networks, product development insight and R&D power from InGAME and Creative Informatics clusters to form a dual city creative technologies cluster supported by innovative product and service platforms that will generate new companies, products and markets for high-end, efficient, sustainable and accessible content creation. CoSTAR Realtime Lab will focus on applying innovative technology and process in entertainment contexts initially focussing on driving value through innovation in the following areas. - Performance and motion capture. - Virtual humans and dynamic procedural performance. - Machine Learning for production and Artificial Intelligence for process reproduction. - Artificial intelligence for dynamic effects and procedural graphics for visual effects. - Using advanced scanning technologies for 3D volume acquisition and ML/AI for procedural environment generation. - Developing lighting and ray tracing standards to deliver environmental fidelity. - Location based Software and hardware integration. - Integrated virtual and real-world film and TV production. The vision for the CoSTAR Realtime Lab will be to establish a mixed reality R&D centre that supports sector engagement in collaborative R&D led innovation. The Lab will facilitate engagement between multinational technology vendors and UK content creators with creative technologists and digital content SMEs to identify opportunities for innovation driven growth in scale and value for the Scottish and UK sector. Collaborative R&D will promote product innovative in SMEs by supporting new product, process and service development, driving value and stimulating diversification of product and markets. By combining world leading research with multinational technology companies and highly creative and dynamic SMEs, the CoSTAR Realtime Lab will transform the creative media industries in Scotland and the UK and deliver global leadership in next generation entertainment creation and technology innovators.

Creative Informatics is an R&D partnership which will grow Edinburgh's creative industries cluster, by helping it to tap the huge potential of using data to shape, develop and deliver new products and services for public and business customers. Over the past ten years, new data-driven products and services have transformed the way people engage with cultural experiences, conduct transactions, and relate to each other. Our ambition is to enable the sector to succeed in an increasingly competitive market, by addressing key innovation challenges and by developing the R&D capacity and data literacy of companies to ensure they can capitalise on new technology to develop new products and services. The R&D Partnership is hosted by the University of Edinburgh, with Edinburgh Napier University and has two key delivery partners: Creative Edinburgh, a well-connected network of over 3800 members, and CodeBase, the largest technology incubator in the UK and one of the fastest growing in Europe. Creative Informatics will benefit from outstanding infrastructure to support delivery including that provided by the Edinburgh and South East Scotland City Region Deal which will focus on Data Driven Innovation. We will bring together cultural partners, creative businesses and entrepreneurs with academic expertise in the fields of design, informatics, business, law and cultural heritage, to address four Innovation Challenges: 1. Developing access to and engagement with new audiences and markets 2. Developing new modalities of experience 3. Unlocking value in archives and data sets 4. Revealing new business models for the creative industries These challenges could see Edinburgh's Festivals extending the festival experiences offered both in Edinburgh and overseas. Outputs from projects could lead to new commercial products for home entertainment, new apps, games, new ways to buy products and services by experiencing them first, new ways for advertising agencies to develop campaigns and experiences for clients, and online experiences for remote participation. Museums and Galleries will be able to mine text and images in their archives to create opportunities for new product lines for SMEs and the tools developed along the way can also be licensed and sold. Partnerships across our cluster will include creative teams who understand new transaction technologies (crowd-financing, micro-payments, cryptocurrencies). This will ensure creative entrepreneurs can develop radical new products and services, whilst understanding the opportunities and threats and ensuring that social interests are safeguarded. The development of data-driven solutions for adapting and distributing content will open up new international market opportunities for a range of creative industries sub-sectors including design, advertising, gaming, publishing, film and TV production companies, music/record companies, and fashion. We will support growth of the cluster through six R&D initiatives which have been co-designed with partners to meet their needs. Challenge Projects, Horizon Projects and Creative Informatics Labs (CI Labs) will respond directly to the four innovation challenges. Creative Bridge, a dedicated data-driven business innovation programme; Resident Entrepreneurs; and Connected Innovators will respond to the challenge of developing and retaining talent, entrepreneurs and leaders to fuel the growth of the creative industries cluster in Edinburgh. Edinburgh's creative industries cluster has a vibrant creative and technology culture in a city internationally renowned for both culture and entrepreneurship. Creative Informatics provides the missing 'cog' to allow creative entrepreneurs to connect with world-leading expertise in data science and Edinburgh's tech and start-up culture and fulfil its potential to make the UK an international centre for creative data-driven innovation.

Our vision is to transform the lives of displaced people encamped in extreme conditions through an engineered solution to housing that promotes a new science of shelter design. The project will entail research in five of the world's largest refugee camps. Zaatari and Azraq (Jordan), Kilis (Turkey), Mae La (Thailand), Nyarugusu (Tanzania). These have populations of up to 250,000 and hence are in many ways cities. They have summer temperatures >35degC and occasionally >40degC; in these conditions un-insulated dwellings are unable to provide safe conditions. In addition, such locations can have 1600W/m2 of solar radiation, further raising the temperature inside a dwelling, and in the case of Jordan winter temperatures of -10degC. In Thailand the high humidity is likely to be of equal importance in placing thermal stress on occupants. In addition, displacement shelters can use polymeric materials which contain a high proportion of VOCs such as plasticisers and release agents, and have poorly ventilated cooking facilities using fuels such as wood, thereby generating particulates. Camps were once expected to be a short term solution, and this is still true in some settings. However, as witnessed in numerous locations around the globe, encampment often continues for years or decades (for example, the 340,000 strong Dadaab camp in Kenya opened in 1992). Even in natural disasters delays in rebuilding can lead to displacement camps taking on aspects of semi-permanent settlement. The challenges of survival in the immediate onset of an emergency quickly give way to concerns about the suitability of shelter over a longer timeframe. Such basic dwellings inhibit domestic life, educational delivery to the young, and development of the social relations needed for community cohesion. Often the need of traumatised people for a sense of security and privacy also goes unmet. Unfortunately, even the state of the art in current shelter provision does not adequately consider building physics, thermal comfort and air quality. There is also a general lack of attention to socio-cultural issues. Thus, for example, our pilot study in Jordan has revealed through social surveys a consistent concern amongst the displaced population with the issues of safety and privacy. Given the diversity of potentially available building materials, climates and cultures, there will be no single shelter solution, but rather a need for a systematic process of design that is cognisant of the climate, landscape, culture, length of time the accommodation might be needed, flexibility as family size changes and portability. This project will develop such a design process by creating a new science of shelter design through engagement with aid agency staff in four countries with diverse weather, cultural conditions and political sensitivities. This will involve 1) wide scale social and indoor environment surveys in five camps; 2) the construction of a series of potential designs in the UK, in a climate chamber and in Jordan; and 3) the production of a multi-language, extreme climate building physics-based, culturally sensitive, shelter design tool for agency field staff.

Knowledge Exchange Hub Design In Action (KEH DIA) is a national network of organisations (academia and industry,) committed to working in effective collaborations, through the ethos of knowledge exchange to deliver a working model of multi-sector participation that meets the requirements for products, processes and services designed for the demands of tomorrows users. It will build economic capability through design-led innovation to ensure that Scotland can maximise its capacity to operate effectively and meet the imperatives of building new economies for future world markets. The aims of KEH DIA are to: Engage design and mobilise entrepreneurial capacity in five key sectors of food, sport, ICT, rural economies and wellbeing Develop a knowledge exchange model for innovation Develop a collaborative partnership model for Scotland that builds upon existing public support mechanisms Understand opportunities for growth in international markets Develop hard and soft metrics for the creative economy KEH DIA offers a genuine alternative to the existing approach to knowledge exchange, which is project-based and demand-led. It currently occurs in isolation and when the need for it has been identified. The KEH DIA is a unique proactive model of knowledge exchange, harnessing the strategic thinking capabilities of design and designers to work on problem identification through dialogue with multiple stakeholders, in order to envision multiple perspectives / scenarios for emerging issues and single complex problems. The core KE activities undertaken by the strategic partners include 15 'Sandpit' events (which is an extreme model for facilitating innovation) resulting in a minimum of 20 Small Grant Scheme awards to develop prototypes, 10-40 support grants for micro-enterprises to fully engage in the process, an interactive Design Portal, Virtual Incubator and a series of 40 Change Audit Grants. The four Scottish art colleges - Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design, Edinburgh College of Art, Glasgow School of Art, Gray's School of Art, University of Abertay Dundee, University of St Andrews, Creative Scotland, Cultural Enterprise, Scottish Enterprise, DC Thomson, and the V&A at Dundee are the key partners, working in conjunction with an additional 30 companies. These companies, range widely from independents to SMEs to multi-nationals and collectively our partners have pledged £1, 470, 563 in-kind support. They are drawn to the project by the KEH DIA's approach to participatory knowledge exchange with many more keen to engage with the truly collaborative approach that the Hub will take. Developing strong networks between academic institutions and various companies to disseminate the research and working practices that arise as a result of the KEH DIA will be key to strengthening the creative economy and to embedding the innovative approach of design throughout these networks. KEH DIA will adopt a wide-ranging dissemination strategy working in partnership with all of its strategic partners to build understanding of design across Scotland for all audiences. It will also use a variety of visual means to articulate design as strategy for innovation; these will be distributed and exhibited across Scotland in a variety of traditional and non-traditional spaces to build momentum, visibility and an appetite to engage with the people and process that are design. Design is the strategy for effective innovation through partnership and provides a model that places design excellence at the heart of its delivery, building an inclusive culture with design values, which will generate a perceptual change in the image of Scotland as a design driven culture. The legacy is to embed in each region in Scotland an innovation strategy, that demonstrates the transformational effect of design to a range of audiences, enabling insights gained to become an established framework for companies to use strategically as a tool for growth.