Immersive technologies will transform not only how we communicate and experience entertainment, but also our experience of the physical world, from shops to museums, cars to classrooms. This transformation has been driven primarily by an unprecedented progress in visual technologies, which enable transporting users to an alternate visual reality. In the domain of audio, there are however long-standing fundamental challenges that need to be overcome to enable striking immersive experiences in which a group of listeners can just walk into a scene and feel transported to an alternate reality to enjoy a seamless shared experience without the need for headphones, head-tracking, personalisation or calibration. The first key challenge is the delivery of immersive audio experiences to multiple listeners. Recent advances in audio technology are beginning to succeed in generating high quality immersive audio experiences. However, these are restricted in practice to individual listeners, with appropriate signals presented either via headphones, or via systems based on a modest number of loudspeakers using either cross-talk cancellation or beamforming. There remains a fundamental challenge in the technologically efficient delivery of "3D sound" to multiple listeners, either in small numbers (2-5) in a home environment, in museums, galleries and other public spaces (5-20) or in cinema and theatre auditoria (20-100). In principle, shared auditory experiences can be generated using physics-based methods such as wavefield synthesis or higher order ambisonics, but a sweet spot of even a modest size requires a prohibitive number of channels. CIAT aims to transform state of the art by developing a principled scalable and reconfigurable framework for capturing and reproducing only perceptually relevant information, thus leading to a step advance in the quality of immersive audio experiences achievable by practically viable systems. The second key challenge is the real-time computation of environment acoustics needed to transport listeners to alternate reality, allowing them to interact with the environment and sound sources in it. This is pertinent to applications where immersive audio content is synthesised rather than recorded and to object-based audio in general. The sound field of an acoustic event consists of direct wavefront, followed by early and higher-order reflections. A convincing experience of being transported to the environment where the event takes place requires the rendering of these reflections, which cannot all be computed in real time. In applications where the sense of realism is critical, e.g. extended reality (XR) and to some extent gaming, impulse responses of the environment are typically computed only at several locations, with preset limits on the number reflections and directions of arrival, and then convolved with source sounds to achieve what is referred to as high-quality reverberation. Still, the computation of impulse responses and convolution may require GPU implementation and careful hands-on balancing between quality and complexity, and between CPU and GPU computation. CIAT aims to deliver a paradigm shift in environment modelling that will enable numerically efficient seamless high quality environment simulation in real time. By addressing these challenges, CIAT will enable creation and delivery of shared interactive immersive audio experiences for emerging XR applications, whilst making a step advance in the quality of immersive audio in traditional media. In particular, efficient real-time synthesis of high quality environment acoustics is essential for both XR and object-based audio in general, including streaming and broadcasting. Delivery of 3D soundscapes to multiple listeners is a major unresolved problem in traditional applications too, including broadcasting, cinema, music events, and audio-visual installations.

The Digital Ghost Hunt is an immersive storytelling experience that transforms coding and digital technology from something foreign and mysterious into a tool of the imagination. In its first implementation, the Digital Ghost Hunt immersive experience will be realised in the historic Battersea Arts Centre (BAC), with a narrative that explore the building's rich historical memory using the creative spirit of an earlier era of open-ended technological experimentation. The key objective of The Digital Ghost Hunt is to present technology to students as an empowering tool, where coding emerges as - and fuses with - different forms of storytelling. It seeks to shift the context in which Key Stage 2 students see coding, engaging groups who may be uninterested in or feel excluded by digital technology, to open up an imaginative space through play for them to discover the creative potential of technology on their own terms. For this pilot project, we will publish code libraries and instructions for affordable hardware kits, and write an initial narrative formed around the fictive Ministry of Paranormal Hygiene. Learning facilitators will appear in class as a team of Ministry scientists, led by the Deputy Undersecretary of Paranormal Hygiene, to initiate their training. Using Raspberry Pi microprocessor kits, their first task will be to program their detection devices. During this phase students will be introduced to the basic logic of programming: variables, looping and decision structures. They will be taught how to use the high-level API (Application Interface) to query their sensors for information, store it and display it. The emphasis will be on students taking ownership of their devices, deciding which of the ghost detectors they want to build and how it works. When they are ready, students will begin their first hunt at a haunted historical building. Students will use the devices they've built to discover clues and research the history of the building to discover the ghost's identity. The ghost will in turn communication with them, given life by actors, practical effects and the poltergeist potential of the Internet of Things. Together students will unravel the mystery of the ghost's haunting, and help set it free.