University of Portsmouth's world-leading virtual reality centre wins top award at city's innovation awards

Centre for Creative and Immersive Extended Reality team with their awards.

Picture: Habibur Rahman — Centre for Creative and Immersive Extended Reality team with their awards. Picture: Habibur Rahman

IT WAS a night of celebration for the University of Portsmouth as its new ground-breaking creative centre successfully hosted The News’ Innovation Awards - and scooped the evening’s top prize.

The £5.2m Centre for Creative and Immersive Extended Reality (CCIXR) was named as the overall winner from the 10 different categories after impressing judges with the cutting-edge work it is already doing since opening earlier this year.

Since then, the centre has produced digital tools to help urban planners at Gosport Borough Council, helped stage the We Shine festival of lights, and created a virtual forest for the Royal Shakespeare Company.

And its work with a number of local cultural partners is already bearing fruit as it helped the Mary Rose Trust win the Digital Innovation Award with exciting and creative ways of bringing the story of Henry VIII’s flagship alive to new audiences.

Hannah Matthews, curator of the Mary Rose said: ‘Having a centre like this on our doorstep makes a huge difference.’

Look inside the exciting new University of Portsmouth CCIXR centre which can (vi...

Judges said that not only was CCIXR putting Portsmouth and the Solent region on the map when it comes to growing the digital creative sector, the centre is also training city students to be the experts of the future.

Professor Trevor Keeble, dean of the faculty of creative and cultural industries, said: ‘We’re absolutely delighted. We have been really lucky working with great partners across the city. And we have lots of projects in the pipeline.

Among the projects is a new augmented reality app for the Spinnaker Tower, which will allow visitors to look across the Solent and see Second World War dogfights and the sinking of the Mary Rose, as the app brings history to life.

Marc Cook, one of the producers at the centre, said the facilities on offer were hard to find anywhere else in the world.

He said: ‘You would need to go to different countries across Europe to find this – and we have it under one roof.’

The Innovation Awards are in their second year and were again supported by BAE Systems as headline sponsors as well as categories being sponsored by Get Set Solent, Lockheed Martin, Portsmouth Water, StartUp Disruptors and The Portsmouth Grammar School.