Memorandum submitted by Engineering and
Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC)
INTRODUCTION
1. EPSRC is the main UK government agency
for funding research and training in engineering and the physical
sciences, investing around £500 million a year in a broad
range of subjects—from mathematics to materials science,
and from information technology to structural engineering.
2. The Council operates to meet the needs
of industry and society by working in partnership with universities
to invest in people and scientific discovery and innovation. The
knowledge and expertise gained maintains a technological leading
edge, builds a strong economy and improves people's quality of
life.
3. The work of EPSRC is complementary to
other research investors including other Research Councils, government
agencies, industry and the European Union. The Council actively
engages in and encourages partnerships and collaborations across
disciplines, boundaries and internationally.
4. EPSRC also actively promote public engagement
in science, engineering and technology.
BACKGROUND ON
THE EPSRC'S
MEDIA AND
CREATIVE INDUSTRIES
PORTFOLIO
5. Digital technology and other new technologies
have helped transform the world of media and creative industries
in recent years. For example, access to on-line newspapers, digital
television, computer aided design, software to create music, audio
and video is now commonplace. EPSRC supports a wide range of research
in technology areas that have driven these advances. We take this
opportunity to draw your attention to key research supported by
the EPSRC which is directly relevant to this inquiry.
6. Currently EPSRC supports media and creative
industries mainly through investment under the fields of "User
Interface Technologies" (36 current grants, £8 million)
and "Multimedia" (18 current grants, £3.2 million)
which includes Music and IT, Computer graphics, Computer Games,
video and sound digital broadcasting.
7. As a result of their mutual interest
in design, EPSRC and AHRC have established the Designing for the
21st Century Initiative as a vehicle for supporting design research
over a five-year period from 2005-09. This initiative aims to
foster the formation of a new diverse community with a common
reference framework and shared understanding of theoretical concepts,
cultures, methods and languages; to stimulate new ways of design
thinking able to meet the challenges of designing for 21st Century
society; and to support leading-edge design research that is self-reflective,
socially aware, economically enterprising and internationally
significant. The first stage of this initiative saw 21 one year
networks funded to run over 2005, totalling £1 million. Many
of their activities were related to the impact upon creative industries
of recent and future developments in digital convergence and media
technology. Examples include clusters on "Technology and
Social Action" (led by Professor Andy Dearden of Sheffield
Hallam University) "Digital Design, Representation, Communication
& Interaction: Screens and the Social Landscape" (led
by Professor Gunter Kress of the Institute of Education), and
"Interrogating Fashion—Practice, Process and Presentation:
New Paradigms in Fashion Design" (led by Professor Sandy
Black of the London College of Fashion). Most clusters included
multiple representatives of the creative industries within their
membership—typically three to four per cluster. In addition,
a call during 2006 will allocate a further £5 million for
research projects and we would expect many creative industries
firms to be collaborators on or to have their work informed by
these projects, and a range of dissemination activities will be
used to promote the output of the projects to them. In addition
to this initiative in Design, EPSRC has an active relationship
with the Design Council. During 2005 we ran a joint initiative
Design for Technology Research exploring how the skills and thinking
of designers can speed technology's route to the marketplace and
we expect to work with them on future design related activities.
8. EPSRC has promoted bridging the interface
between science and engineering and the arts and humanities through
its Culture and Creativity programme. This programme has supported
£700k in 14 research networks and four visiting fellowships
to assist in building these ties and with potential for both scientific
and cultural outcomes. One of the networks supported under this
initiative is the new international and interdisciplinary research
Network Pervasive and Locative Arts Network (PLAN, http://www.open-plan.org/).
This network draws together computer scientists and engineers
leading the field in developing pervasive and locative technologies;
artists who are using these technologies to create and publicly
deploy innovative and provocative experiences; social scientists
studying interactive installations and performances; industrial
partners from the creative industries, spanning the arts, television,
games, education, heritage, mobile computing and telecommunications
sectors; and international partners who are coordinating parallel
networks around the world.
9. EPSRC supports the £10.6 million
Equator Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration (IRC) which has
played an essential role in developing the inter-relationships
and integration between physical and digital interaction. For
instance, the Equator IRC has developed a portable mixed-reality
interface for outdoors used to re-create Nottingham's medieval
castle on the site of the modern one, thereby enhancing the visitor
experience and Enlighten interactive flashlights technology to
support large interactive displays in public settings such as
museums, galleries and exploratoria. The Equator has also collaborated
with the artists group BlastTheory to develop and produce Can
You See Me Now? (CYSMN), which is a pervasive game that mixes
players on the streets of a city with online players in a virtual
model of that city. This has been toured around abroad and was
awarded the Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica for Interactive Art
in 2003 and nominated for a BAFTA in Interactive Entertainment
in 2002. The University of Nottingham has filed for a patent and
is currently establishing a spin-out company to take the technology
to market. At the time of writing, three customers have offered
contracts for installations including the MAGNA Science Activity
Centre in Rotherham. The Equator project collaborated with Blast
Theory, British Telecom and Microsoft Research to create a pervasive
performance called Uncle Roy All Around You that was staged in
London, Manchester and West Bromwich and that was twice BAFTA
nominated in 2005. As a result of their collaborations with Equator,
British Telecom, the BBC, Microsoft Research, Blast Theory have
joined with The University of Nottingham and also the University
of Bath and the company called ScienceScope Ltd, to create a pervasive
computing platform to support mass-participation campaigns for
mobile, broadcast and online media. A three year project beginning
in 2006 has been funded under the DTI/EPSRC Technology Programme.
Led by researchers from the Royal College of Art, Equator has
collaborated with the Ordinance Survey (who donated terabytes
of aerial photograph data) to create the Drift Table, a piece
of interactive furniture that employs load-sensing technology
to enable its owners to fly a birds-eye camera over Britain from
the comfort of their living room.
10. Another example of new technology broadly
taken up by creative industries is a software used to add special
effects to hundreds of films and adverts, including "Harry
Potter" and "Lord of the Rings". This was an outcome
of the EPSRC project "Video and Virtual Camera Integration"
(LINK GR/M82790/01). This project involved three partners: Oxford
University for the original research; the company 2d3 (www.2d3.com),
for the development of industry standard software; and the company
Mill Film (http://www.mill.co.uk/), as an end user of the software.
The project succeeded in developing a commercial camera tracker
software package. The camera tracker software was particularly
welcomed by the television industry, which conferred an Emmy award
in 2002.
11. EPSRC and ESRC will be launching in
March 2006 a new programme of research entitled "Technology
Enhanced Learning: Understanding and Exploiting Digital Technologies
for Learning". £6 million is being made available in
the first instance to fund high-quality adventurous research in
projects cutting across the disciplines of learning, cognition,
ICT and education. This programme is expected to be of great interest
to the Creative Industries.
12. EPSRC is also currently seeking to achieve
a joint funding agreement with AHRC in order to strengthen the
support for projects that we can offer in areas the cross our
remits, including many impacts of developing digital media technologies.
28 February 2006
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