The latest report from the Foresight Lab offers insight into the landscape of Extended Reality (XR) activity over the last 20 years. It provides an overview of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) investment into XR technologies for screen, performance and digital entertainment between 2006 and 2024, setting the context for the Convergent Screen Technologies and Performance in Realtime (CoSTAR) Network.
The report uses publicly available data from UKRI’s Gateway to Research database to track the number of XR projects funded by UKRI during this time period, the amount of funding awarded, and which funding schemes awarded the most funding.
Analysis of those involved in these projects shows the distribution of participating organisations across the UK and beyond. It identifies the major actors across academia and industry, with Higher Education Institutions, media production and software companies, and cultural and heritage organisations all participating in cross-sector networks of collaboration.
By zooming in on just the Virtual Production (VP) projects, the report tells a story of cumulative investment by UKRI in technologies, infrastructures and the place-based ecosystems required to utilise them.
In providing an overview of the funding context of UK-based XR activity before the intervention of the CoSTAR Network, in similar and adjacent spaces to CoSTAR, the report functions as a baseline view of the funding context to track key trends in funding allocations and funded XR activity, to quantify investment in the space as a first step to demonstrating results of the investment, and to identify knowledge gaps in the investment history of UK-based XR activity.
The report surfaces areas for future study, such as the crossover between XR technologies and use cases in the heritage sector, which will be addressed in future work by the Foresight Lab.
