MyWorld's Research

MyWorld’s research focus enables us to embed research and development (R&D) culture at scale, across the creative technology sector, extending horizons and reducing risks.

Ideas development can consume 20% of effort in a small business and major challenges exist for businesses of all sizes preventing them from investing in, and benefiting from, R&D. MyWorld’s university partners provide R&D expertise and facilities that companies can easily engage with, creating a unique co-development environment that would otherwise be impossible, allowing innovation-led growth for all the businesses engaging in our network.

MyWorld’s research is focused around the highly inter-related areas of content creation, capture delivery and consumption – the Creative Continuum. This focus allows us to drive innovation across all stages of the content lifecycle. Each of the MyWorld research focus areas detailed below explore the different stages of the Creative Continuum through integrated academic-industry collaborations by world-leading organisations, in an established collaborative R&D network. This generates new knowledge and confidence to exploit technical advances, allowing companies to access knowledge, lead innovation and create and maintain a competitive advantage in their industry.

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Research areas

Dave Bull

Dave Bull FIET, FIEEE is Director of MyWorld and leads the programme as we look to pioneer new digital formats and technologies, creating innovative experiences across fiction, documentary, games, and live performance. As well this he is Professor of Signal Processing at the University of Bristol and Director of Bristol Vision Institute (BVI), a venture he co-founded in 2007. BVI is a virtual research institute and has been highly successful in stimulating research interaction and collaboration in vision science and engineering.

He also leads the Visual Information Laboratory, a research group within the Faculty of Engineering at Bristol and was previously a Lecturer at the University of Wales (Cardiff) and Systems Engineer for Rolls Royce. He holds a BSc (Exeter, 1st class), an MSc (Manchester, Distinction) and PhD (Cardiff) and was Head of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Bristol from 2001-06.

His work specialises in visual communications, coding and computer vision. He has won many prizes, including the 2017 IEEE Video Compression Grand Challenge, and Premium awards for his papers. He has published numerous patents, several of which have been exploited commercially. He has published over 450 papers, various articles and 2 books, most recently Communicating Pictures, published by Academic Press.

In 2001 Dave co-founded ProVision Communication Technologies Ltd. which is best known for producing the world’s first in-home multi-room wireless HDTV sender. In 2011 ProVision was acquired by Global Invacom.

In 1996 he helped to establish the UK DTI Virtual Centre of Excellence in Digital Broadcasting and Multimedia Technology and was one of its Directors from 1997-2000. He was also a founder member of the UK’s MoD Defence Technology Centre in Data and Information Fusion, serving on its Science and Technology Board. He was an independent member of UK Government’s Defence Scientific Advisory Council (DSAC) in 2002, contributing to the UK(MoD)-US(DoD) Working Group on Persistent Surveillance (2004). He has also advised Government through membership of the UK Foresight Panel and HEFCE REF2014. Throughout his career, Dave has acted as a consultant to many companies, universities and governments. He has also been a DTI Distinguished Professor.

The Creative Continuum

“The Creative Continuum is both a philosophy and a way of working. It covers a lot of things that people in the creative sector often think of as being either discrete elements or as an end-to-end process. Creation, production, delivery and consumption are, in fact, highly interdependent.”

Professor David Bull, MyWorld Programme Director

The Creative Continuum, at the heart of MyWorld’s research, applies not only to the process of content creation but also the different perspectives and skill sets that are needed to deliver it, resulting in innovative capture, delivery, measurement and tooling for the creative industries.

That might mean computer scientists working with psychologists and ethicists to deliver immersive VR experiences that address privacy concerns. Or a start-up pioneer making use of the specialist expertise of PhD students to find ways for an entertainment company to better engage with their audiences, for example. Such collaborative projects cannot successfully build the next generation of audience experiences without cross-disciplinary teams working together to solve challenges across technology, tooling, media types, formats and narrative.

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