Children and adults alike had fun interacting with our demos at the family friendly South West Futures Festival on Brunel’s SS Great Britain at the end of September.

From petting a dog in a virtual world environment, to 3D scanning unicorns or seeing their bones come to life as they walked, jumped and jived in front of our pose estimator, young and old(er!) minds and bodies were vividly engaged in learning about motion, movement and the recreation of our world into digital environments.

We enjoyed helping inquisitive visitors explore a virtual reality environment we’ve been using in a recent psychology research project that involved the creation of personalised avatars.

Whilst we couldn’t create their own personalised avatars on site, we were able to give attendees hands on experience of how an object is rendered in 3D by using one of our Artec 3D scanners. This created the perfect springboard into conversation about how the digital objects and avatars they see in computer games and VR are constructed and have them think about some of the challenges this generates.

Learning how computer vision and machine learning take image data and use it to detect the position and orientation of a person or object was a novel way of having visitors explore the interactive possibilities between human and machine.

“One girl was having a great fun moving in front of our Media Pipe demo,” said Rebekah Hole, CAMERA Centre Manager.

“We chatted about how cool it would be if pose estimation was built into her TV and how it could help by giving personalised feedback when she was doing Cosmic Kids Yoga for example. It was joyous to see her face light up as the connection between the demo and her real life landed.”

“Having the technology and the demos is great, but what really takes it to the next level is how we’re able to open new worlds of understanding through the questions children ask us,” said Rebekah.

We had great pleasure in working alongside our colleagues from the Bath Institute for the Augmented Human, who were delighting viewers with their mind-controlled computer game which uses motor imagery control through EEG, and picking up sweets with a robot arm.

“What a brilliant job the CAMERA team and the Institute for the Augmented Human did!” said Dean Veall, Deputy Head of Public Engagement. 

“Over the course of the evening so many visitors got to experience the technologies used by the team in their research, sparking curiosity and inspiring some great conversations about the impact their work is having,”

Photo Credit: Scott Piggott

FUTURES: A Festival of Discovery is a public engagement collaboration between the University of Bath, Bath Spa University, University of Bristol, University of Exeter and University of Plymouth funded by UK Research and Innovation.