InnovateUK and EU approve £1.2m in funding for immersive technology from Disguise

Disguise, an HPA-Award-winning immersive experience company, has received £1.2 Million in funding from Innovate UK and the EU as part of a larger investment into MAX-R — an alliance of companies dedicated to advancing virtual production, extended reality, virtual reality and metaverse technologies.

The MAX-R alliance — which is made up of Disguise, the BBC, ARRI, Improbable, Brainstorm, Foundry, FilmLight, The University of Hasselt, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, CREW and Film Akademie Baden-Wurtumberg — has already announced its first developments. For Disguise, these are primarily focused on streamlining productions so that filmmakers, live events experts, broadcasters and more can use immersive technologies with fewer licence requirements and other costs. This will open up the creative possibilities for mid-to-low budget productions, helping to make virtual production and extended reality technology available to projects including shorts, ads and corporate presentations.

Disguise’s new MAX-R technology developments include:

• RSConnect — connect your live events to metaverse platforms and more using a new protocol that allows for the transfer of audio, visual media and metadata from Disguise’s Designer into a third-party system.
• Depth Reprojection — capture more exciting cinematography on a virtual production set by improving depth estimations. This results in a more realistic 3D background, even when the camera perspective shifts.
• OCIO — define your own colour space on a virtual production set, helping you seamlessly integrate your shots into visual effects pipelines.
• Reimaging 2.0 — reduce downtime when configuring your media servers. Initial results from Reimaging 2.0 offer a 83-84% decrease in time needed for a 10 server bank to be completely reimaged, streamlining the setup for large productions and enabling teams to get back to work faster than previously possible.
• Porta — enhance the level of control that’s available to on-set operators with software that offers more experimental transitions, scheduling and content manipulation options.

“MAX-R will offer exciting new opportunities to broaden the way creators and audiences craft, present and interact with digital realities,” says Disguise Chief Collaboration Officer Abi Bowman. “By offering an array of tools to streamline existing ways of working or facilitate exciting new ones, we’re making sure that the next generation of content creators have the tools they need to make the virtual world look and feel as real as the physical one.”