The stories of tomorrow will reach audiences in new and complex ways, fuelled by immersive technologies, data-driven personalisation, smart devices and AI alongside evolutions in contemporary screen form. Screen industries' creative story processes, techniques, business models, value networks and workflows are thus challenged to iterate a next generation of storytelling that can engage audiences in novel and commercially viable experiences. We span screen and createch industries, converging world leaders in storytelling, including Double Negative, Punchdrunk, nDreams, Sony, Pinewood, BBC Worldwide, HTC Vive and the BFI, to work alongside SMEs. We match these with academic expertise traversing story form (Media, Gaming, Drama); audience behaviour (Psychology); business models (Management); production cultures (Media); hardware, software and user interfaces (Engineering, Comp Sci, Design), to facilitate R&D that will create innovative and compelling content, products and service for emerging creative technologies. StoryFutures will grow both screen and createch industries. Led by an innovative StoryLab model, we work across 4 themes: T1 StoryLab; T2 Value Networks; T3 Data in the Creative Workflow; T4 Audience Engagement. Our StoryLab (T1) provides expertise and space for collaborative approaches to creative challenges that are barriers to business growth, such as how to increase user comfort in VR, build social immersive experiences or novel exploitation of existent IP. It will operate at professional and student level, spanning FE, HE and CPD, training a next generation of storytellers and entrepreneurs in world-class creative content and products. StoryLab will develop, fund and support prototype and risky innovations in story form that tackle such challenges, providing SMEs with new business opportunities and access to further funding and mentoring (T2). SF's R&D programme links these innovative productions with R&D on the effective management of data in the creative production pipeline, enabling more efficient and creative workflows (T3). And, via our partner distribution platforms (HTC, Heathrow, BFI, Sky VR), tests next gen experiences with audiences in novel ways that produce rich understandings of their engagement, including cognitive and neurological responses linked to a long-range analysis of youth audiences' preferences in these new spaces (T4). Across this work we will grow revenues and jobs in our region and beyond. With over £6.7m in leverage funding, SF is led by Royal Holloway together with its industry partners and HEIs, Brunel, NFTS and University of Creative Arts. SF spans film, television, gaming and immersion across a regional cluster that forms a gateway in and out of London. It will connect the film studios in the region's north to Guildford's gaming in the south, across to the west's plethora of createch companies and back to London's intensity of creative industries (see map). The cluster thus emphasises the region's - and UK economy's - fusion of digital and creative skills, with such companies likely to be 'more productive and have higher growth rates than [those] located entirely in one discipline' (Bazalgette 2017: 14). The region contains nearly 20% of the UK's high concentration, high growth creative Travel to Work Areas, forming the highest proportion of creative jobs and businesses outside of London. Within the cluster Heathrow constitutes "a critical driver of the area's economy" (TVBerkshire, 2017) as well as a gateway to the global markets and audiences that our innovative products and services must reach. SF will address a significant challenge for the UK creative economy in sustaining creative conurbations that have the potential for 'higher levels of business productivity' than Creative Cities (Nesta, 2016: 6). The Gateway Cluster thus has potential to form a powerhouse akin to the 'Golden Triangle' of medical research, industrial collaboration and innovation to its immediate north.

The aim of TAPESTRY is to investigate, develop and demonstrate transformational new technologies to enable people, businesses and digital services to connect safely online, exploiting the complex "tapestry" of multi-modal signals woven by their everyday digital interactions; their Digital Personhood. In this way we will de-risk the Digital Economy, delivering completely new ways of determining or engendering trust online, and enabling users and businesses to make better decisions about who they trust online. Online fraud and scams cost the UK economy £670m each year; crimes often perpetrated through false identities. It is difficult to make good decisions about who to trust when the digital identities of people and services are presented through pseudonyms or addresses. How can we trust that the identity we are interacting with today wasn't created out of thin air yesterday to pull a scam? Or whether the service we are registering our personal data with is trustworthy? In an era of users curating multiple digital identities that evolve over their physical lifespan, and the coming ability to migrate identities between providers (most of whom reside outside the EU), there is an urgent need for decentralised technologies to enable proofs of trust between people and services wishing to interact safely within the Digital Economy. TAPESTRY will co-create and evaluate prototype services with end-users to determine how online behaviour and attitudes to trust could evolve in the presence of a trusted decentralised technology to prove the veracity of online identities. TAPESTRY proposes to collect, on an opt-in basis, digital trails of users' interactions (photos shared, comments left, posts 'liked', IoT devices interacted with) as encrypted trust evidence within a decentralised database (blockchain). Users grant third parties access to trust evidence for a given time period and at a given granularity, in order to prove trustworthiness of their identity via their digital personhood. For example, a crowd-funder might invite new backers to submit 2 years' history of regular social media interactions to guard against fraudulent pledging from transient identities. Community forums are becoming increasingly important for emotional support and well-being. A similar check could safeguard against trolling, or an identity posting advice could collect positive ratings within their blockchain, enabling vetting of their reputation. Deviations from behavioural norms could also be detectable within TAPESTRY to alert users to their digital identity being hacked. From a technological standpoint, the project will develop the decentralised infrastructure necessary to make sense of the vast number of digital interactions using multimodal signals aggregated via machine learning from social media and IoT interactions. Additionally, new cryptographic strategies will be needed to secure the privacy of trust evidence and to disseminate access on a granular basis. From a HCI and co-design perspective, the development of trust services and the shift to use of the digital personhood and interaction history as trust evidence will break new ground, fundamentally altering the way users think about identity and interaction online. To undertake this adventurous and ambitious project we have formed a strategic multi-disciplinary partnership uniting world-leading groups in multi-modal signal processing and machine learning (CVSSP), a BIS/GCHQ recognised centre of excellence for Cyber Security (SCCS), the UK's first and only 5G test-bed for next-gen mobile and IoT (ICS/5GIC), and reflecting the importance of co-designing and evaluating technology in tight integration with end-users, two leading UK groups for socio-digital interaction (DJCAD) and interaction design (UNN). End-user partners participating in the co-design and evaluation of TAPESTRY span the technology, legal, social reform, health and well-being and commercial sectors.