Case studies

Uncertain Space 

Created by the University of Bristol Library team, this Virtual Museum is an educational resource that brings the University’s archive to life for a whole new audience. Cultural and historic objects rendered through 3D scans, augmented by audio and text labels, provide users with an immersive experience that they enter through the Reality Emulator or an online platform, using headsets to wander through multiple rooms.  

Uncertain Space demonstrates how the Reality Emulator can be used to open up the exploration of archival material that might otherwise remain limited to physical spaces and a select few who can access them.  

CM1 Building Information Model 

This immersive version of the main academic building – CM1 – in the University of Bristol’s flagship Temple Quarter Enterprise Campus (TQEC) allows operational staff, academics, managers, and future users to imagine its potential, and so contribute to its development. Users can bring up latest representations of future rooms, layouts, office spaces, and teaching spaces, with detailed immersive renderings of specific rooms that give users and the local community a sense of how they might engage with the facilities on offer. 

CM1 demonstrates how the Reality Emulator can be used by different groups of people with a shared interest to collaborate on design decisions, whether configuring plans for future products or new buildings. Once the development of the CM1 building is complete at TQEC in 2026, sensor data could be used in combination with detailed visual renderings of the site to manage it in an immersive way.  

Group decision making on CM1 public art  

We created an immersive model of the civic space within CM1 to allow various stakeholders as well as the artist and architect of the project to visualise and interact with the public art before the design is finalised. This enables everyone involved to determine the final output with greater clarity and certainty, thanks to being able to experiment with various configurations, colours, and mechanisms of movement for their artwork. 

Visualising the ‘lecture theatre in the round’  

We created an immersive model of the 360-degree lecture theatre that will be located within CM1, to allow academics and other potential room users to visualise the facility before the actual building is available to use, thus allowing potential room users to share their feedback with the project team behind the build stage. 

Energy visualisation 

Not all immersive environments need to be developed from scratch. One of the many benefits of the Reality Emulator is its ability to transform readily available data into an immersive setting, as evidenced by this Energy Visualisation. Using the ready-made city pack with its adaptable urban environments, this project takes data from open access sources, augmented with visual design aspects, to show energy usage in household and other buildings.  

As well as reducing the time and costs involved, this approach opens opportunities for collaborative planning and community engagement. Groups can be invited to explore an immersive environment to further their understanding of energy consumption and design solutions for the future. It’s also possible to invite users to participate in the design and build stage of immersive environments themselves. For those interested in sustainability, whether schoolchildren or policymakers, this is a novel way to engage with and address the issue. 

Nanover (Engineering Biology) 

Virtual Reality is an invaluable resource for researchers, enabling them to accelerate the scope and potential applications of their work, as demonstrated by two projects where University of Bristol researchers are using the Reality Emulator to see and manipulate complex biological processes in an immersive setting. This ability to remotely control the research environment paves the way for discussions around the future of training and supervision environments and remote working in complex situations.  

EOY.4D2 is a de novo photovoltaic protein, designed computationally and refined by modelling and directed evolution, that has been characterised experimentally. This work is based on Professor Ross Anderson’s 4D2 protein, which was designed to bind a photosensitiser (eosin y) and a heme, allowing it to absorb light and transfer electrons. Professor Anderson’s lab is collaborating with researchers from the Circuits of Life engineering biology project to explore how new proteins can be used as building blocks for biological electronics.  

GluHUT is a glucose receptor designed and developed by Professor Antony Davis, who has been at the forefront of research into synthetic sugar receptors for the last 20 years, and is the co-founder of the spin-out company Ziylo (subsequently acquired in 2018 by global healthcare company Novo Nordisk in a deal worth up to $800m). We are now using VR to model binding of sugars to GluHUT, to understand its specificity for glucose, working with Professor Davis’s group to design receptors for other carbohydrates, as part of two European Research Council-funded Advanced Grant projects. 

Moonraker 

Moonraker VFX is a Bristol-based visual effects company that that is at the forefront of giant screen content creation. They have been using our facilities to make use of the full resolution perspective provided by our LED panels. One of their recent projects, which tells the story of the USA’s involvement in World War 2, required them to deliver an 8k resolution computer graphics generated film for a museum in the USA. The film output spanned across a very wide screen. Moonraker needed a physical testing site which would offer a solution to view at full scale and to quality control the content at a sufficiently high resolution. Enter the Reality Emulator, where the Moonraker team has been able to work on their project with greater technological ease.