The existing vRSP project explores new, responsive, immersive, and interactive methods of experiencing a recorded performance, as well as allowing users to explore the unique heritage places for which these performances have been created. The existing vRSP network has created a prototype demonstrator of a new form of immersive site-specific music performance. In the existing prototype, a solo singer, moves through the space. Currently, the audience can only rotate around to watch and listen to this singer. If audience members move too close to the singer, the illusion breaks down, due to the quality and resolution of the capture. This follow-on bid proposes to work with a new industry partner, Dimension Studios, to polish this demonstrator to the highest possible standard in order to allow audiences to experience the ability to physically explore a virtual space and walk around inside a live music performance, giving audience a more direct experience than currently possible One of the most experimental aspects of the existing vRSP project has been the integration of 360 video, mapped environment capture, performance, sound and volumetric multi-dimensional (aka holographic) video. The latter aspect has only recently become a viable 'audience proposition', as the recreation of a realistic yet synthesised human performer needs to adequately bridge the 'uncanny valley' to create a believable and acceptable experience for the viewer/listener/interactor. Indeed, one of the few examples of this integration so far is the Hold the World project for Sky/Natural History Museum featuring a virtually recreated David Attenborough demonstrating interactive animated exhibits in person and in vivo. Successful volumetric video capture could only be achieved in this project with the full power of a large consortium of professional production partners, plus the full technological might of Microsoft's volumetric capture studios in Redmond and their UK incarnation at Dimension Studios in Wimbledon. To do this process to an general audience-ready standard is time-consuming, complicated and resource intensive. For the initial phase of VRSP, we needed to experiment with the mix of immersive media and see if the overall impact was as hoped, particularly in terms of the harmonisation of imageries (and sound). We therefore adopted a 'proof of concept' approach to 4D volumetric capture using resources within University of Surrey's CVSSP to create a low resolution proxy of the final result. Having done this, we saw that the overall effect was absolutely worth pursuing, but only with the higher 'professional' resolution version of the capture, which was at that point beyond our means and scope. The partners have agreed that to make this mass audience-ready, we need to recreate the initial capture using the kind of technological resources which were available to the Hold the World project, which are fortunately relatively close at hand within Dimension Studios, who we have now signed up as a project contributor. The network can now massively benefit from their expertise, and with their input we an ensure that the outputs are a veritable worthy match of Price's amazing musical tapestries, and a great, high production value audience experience.

Personalisation of media experiences for the individual is vital for audience engagement of young and old, allowing more meaningful encounters tailored to their interest, making them part of the story, and increasing accessibility. The goal of the BBC Prosperity Partnership is to realise a transformation to future personalised content creation and delivery at scale for the public at home or on the move. Evolution of mass-media audio-visual 'broadcast' content (news, sports, music, drama) has moved increasingly towards Internet delivery, which creates exciting potential for hyper-personalised media experiences delivered at scale to mass audiences. This radical new user-centred approach to media creation and delivery has the potential to disrupt the media landscape by directly engaging individuals at the centre of their experience, rather than predefining the content as with existing media formats (radio, TV, film). This will allow a new form of user-centred media experience which dynamically adapts to the individual, their location, the media content and producer storytelling intent, together with the platform/device and the network/compute resources available for rendering the content.The BBC Prosperity Partnership will position the BBC at the forefront of this 'Personalised Media' revolution enabling the creation and delivery of new services, and positioning the UK creative industry to lead future personalised media creation and intelligent network distribution to render personalised experiences for everyone anywhere. Realisation of personalised experiences at scale presents three fundamental research challenges: capture of object-based representations of the content to enable dynamic adaption for personalisation at the point of rendering; production to create personalised experiences which enhance the perceived quality of experience for each user; and delivery at scale with intelligent utilisation of the available network, edge and device resources for mass audiences. The BBC Prosperity Partnership will address the major technical and creative challenges to delivering user-centred personalised audience experiences at scale. Advances in audio-visual AI for machine understanding of captured content will enable the automatic transformation of captured 2D video streams to an object-based media (OBM) representation. OBM will allow adaptation for efficient production, delivery and personalisation of the media experience whilst maintaining the perceived quality of the captured video content. To deliver personalised experiences to audiences of millions requires transformation of media processing and distribution architectures into a hybrid and distributed low-latency computation platform, allowing flexible deployment of compute-intensive tasks across the network. This will achieve efficiency in terms of cost and energy use, while providing optimal quality of experience for the audience within the technical constraints of the system.

Data-driven innovation is transforming every sector of our digital economy (DE) into a de-centralised marketplace; accommodation (AirBnb), transportation (Uber), logistics (Deliveroo), user-generated vs. broadcast content in the creative industries (YouTube). We are witnessing an inexorable shift from classical models centred upon monolithic institutions, to a dynamic and decentralised economy in which anyone is a potential producer and consumer. A gig economy, underpinned by digital products and services co-created through shorter-lived, diverse peer-to-peer engagements. Yet, the platforms that enable this DE are increasingly built on centralised architectures. These are not controlled by society, but by large organisations making commercial decisions far from the social contexts they affect. There is an urgent need to disrupt this relationship, to deliver proper governance that empowers society to take control of the DE and enables people to assert greater agency over the vast centralised silos of data that drive these platforms. We stand on the cusp of a second wave of DE disruption, driven by bleeding edge data-driven technologies (AI) and secure, distributed data sharing infrastructures such as Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT), in which data is no longer siloed but becomes a fluid, de-centralised commodity shifting power away from tech giants to individuals and de-centralised organisations. This future Decentralised Digital Economy (DDE) enables people and organisations to work together, to trade, and ultimately to trust via frictionless digital interactions free from reliance upon centralised third parties, but often with reliance upon autonomous services. This shift in agency and power is a game changing opportunity for society to take back control over its digital economy - but we have a limited window of opportunity to get it right. We have already witnessed de-centralisation in the financial sector, where the lack of regulation and clear governance of crypto-currencies has proven a double-edged sword, allowing free exchange of value across the globe, but that is coupled with fraudulent company flotations and currency rates rigged by large mining pools. This is a consequence of technology-driven innovation unchecked by socio-economic insight; a lack of knowledge making policy makers impotent in the face of the tech giants. We are now at the tipping point of similar wide-sweeping disruption across all sectors in the DDE, a transformation that will radically redefine our models of value and how it is created, the ways in which we work, and how we use and extract value from our data. DECaDE represents a critical and timely opportunity to shape this emerging de-centralised digital economy (DDE), to develop insights that define a new 21st century model of work and value creation in the DDE, and ensure a prosperous, safe and inclusive society for all. DECaDE is a 60 month centre, comprising 21 people and building upon over 8.6 million pounds of feasibility scale UKRI/EPSRC investments in DLT and Human Data Interaction (HDI) held by the proposing team. DECaDE is a three-way partnership between the Universities of Surrey and Edinburgh, and the Digital Catapult DLT Field Labs. The latter is a full member of the consortium, through which we have co-created this research programme and with whom we will engage in further co-creation of the future DDE through diverse end-users in the public and private sector to support the competitive position of the UK