Immersive Liverpool

The first event was at Sensor City and focused on mixed reality, with speakers from Laval Virtual and Invest Liverpool, and demos ranging from virtual reality to holographic experiences and mobile apps. February took us to the VR Here arcade for shared experiences in immersive environments with vTime and Synthetic Worlds. March was storytelling in augmented reality, with BBC R&D, Draw & Code and the Immersive Storylab, and a live link to the Laval Virtual Festival in France.

In April we took a delegation of ten companies and organisations to the ARVR Innovate Conference in Dublin, to build collaborations with our twin city across the Irish Sea. In May, with the BIMA Immersive Tech Thinktank and the Alder Hey Innovation Unit, we looked at immersive technology in healthcare: surgeons working in mixed reality, training innovations from the University of Liverpool Medical School, Diabetes UK and Immersive Interactive.

In June we supported Immersive Technologies Disrupting the Future of Healthcare at the International Festival for Business, which drew over 200 people. In December 2018 we supported the Immersive Storytelling Experiences Research Symposium, with over 200 delegates exploring R&D in the field. In March 2019 we supported the Storyhack XR residency, and in April ran an interactive video workshop with artist Sam Meech.

Alongside the events we worked with Liverpool City Council on a strategy for the region, and the network was one of the strands of work cited when I was named in the BIMA 100. It is still going, now as Immersive Liverpool, the city region's creative technology network: around 880 members, twenty-odd events on the Meetup, and a remit that has widened with the field to take in creative AI, games, realtime content and virtual production. These days it is mostly an online community that gets together once or twice a year, and it still feeds the wider events programme I run across the region.

Related: AI consultancy, prototyping and training in Liverpool and Manchester.