How talent and technology are driving England’s knowledge North.

When the prestigious American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York City wanted to revamp its astronomy exhibit, it looked to the stars of virtual reality. It found a centre not in Silicon Valley but in the north of England’s Tees Valley.

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The Virtual Reality Centre (VRC) in Middlesbrough, Tees Valley, is home to the world’s first hemispherical viewing dome, which is designed to project a high-resolution, seamless computer image across a hemispherical surface.

Established in 1997, the centre provided the venue for much of the virtual reality (VR) work for the AMNH’s Hayden Planetarium exhibit, which now houses the most advanced Space Theater in the world.

“It was at the VRC in the Tees Valley that we were able to troubleshoot and prove the concept of displaying the NASA-funded model of the Milky Way Galaxy on a domed surface,” says Carter Burwell Emmart, director of astrovisualisation at the museum.

The centre has also developed a 10-camera motion capture system that can be used to capture human movement. Portable, it can be transported to any business or studio to undertake the capture and is a highly attractive resource for the north of England’s growing group of games designers and animators, dramatically improving the ‘reality’ of new games.

“The VRC now offers some of the very latest virtual reality technologies, which are already attracting users from industry,” says Janice Webster, the VRC’s director. “The new centre will provide a dramatic leap forward in applying practical uses of virtual reality to both educational and commercial projects.”

In the city of Manchester, The Advanced Virtual Prototyping Group at the University of Salford’s Centre for Virtual Environments has a leading research team focused on industrially-relevant VR research for the construction and engineering sectors. The group promotes the development of innovative virtual prototyping technologies into practical 3D design tools through research into the techniques of interaction, visualisation and simulation. Among current projects are FutureHome – a virtual design environment for exploring design concepts and construction planning, allowing designers and contractors to explore different design concepts and construction sequences before committing production resources.

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Building and providing first-class infrastructure is key to this growth and development. Incubation units for start-ups, centres of excellence for improved research – encouraging higher productivity, more new business formation, greater innovation and increased inward investment have all added to the north of England’s increasing success.

The Media Centre in Huddersfield is one example, focusing on the development and dissemination of dynamic and experimental approaches to the fields of digital and interactive media arts practice. The Media Centre’s hub is the Digital Research Unit, launched in 2002, which provides facilities and a network of support to artists, programmers and academics.

Providing the backbone to a burgeoning VR and software development sector is the UK’s second internet exchange, MaNAP in Manchester. Newly-installed switching technology means that MaNAP now has similar world-class switching infrastructure to the London internet exchange (LINX) and major European internet exchange points. MaNAP has the capacity to switch the whole of the UK internet load, so for the first time ever, there is geographic redundancy between London and the north of England.

The concentration of internet traffic switching in one area of London has been a matter of concern for many internet service providers (ISPs), network operators and government agencies for some time. Many larger ISPs have relied on the exchanges in Holland and Germany for their fail-over strategies.

Michael Welch, the American CEO of Digital Industries North West, says: “MaNAP is not only the north of England’s jewel-in-the-crown it is now a part of the UK’s national critical infrastructure, which every serious ISP, network operator and major ICT [information communications technology] user should join immediately to increase resilience of the UK internet.”

It is little wonder that a high-quality network infrastructure, a wealth of creative and talented people and forward-looking universities have ranked Manchester – the UK’s second city – as one of Europe’s best software locations. Its strong software development sector is underpinned by the presence of large multinational technology bellwethers such as IBM, Sun, Hewlett Packard and Oracle.

With this wealth of talent, its tradition of creativity and the most up-to-date academic and physical infrastructure found anywhere in the world, the north of England will continue to be the birth place of technologies that will change the way people work and play around the world.

The North of England Inward Investment Agency is a joint collaboration between The Northwest Development Agency, Yorkshire Forward and One Northeast in North America, assisting companies on a free and confidential basis. For more information contact +1 (847) 593 6020 or visit us at www.thenoe.com

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