Conduit #2

CONDUIT

SERAPIS SIMULATION AND SYNTHETIC ENVIRONMENTS NEWSLETTER

ISSUE TWO, AUTUMN 2020

THE SERIOUS SIDE OF GAMING A scan of the SERAPIS SSE tasks developing a deeper understanding of technology’s training treasures

ALL-WEATHER WARRIORS

INTELLIGENT INNOVATION

GAME CHANGER

Meet the simulation company helping NATO partners to bring rain, shine and snow to synthetic environments P4-5

How the entertainment industry has expedited the emergence of advanced artificial intelligence algorithms P6-9

A graduate of the PlayStation generation shares his views on shaping virtual reality’s continued evolution P10-12

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STILL CHEER TO BE FOUND AMID THE GLOBAL GLOOM OVER A SECOND SPIKE For those left feeling downbeat by a summer dominated by disrupted

Since then the growth in membership and progression of tasks have maintained

holiday plans and disputed exam results, I hope the following pages serve as a welcome tonic.

This second issue of Conduit – in contrast to the gloom of media headlines elsewhere – is certainly coursing with cause for celebration as the SERAPIS Simulation and Synthetic Environments (SSE) success story continues unabated by Covid-19.

Lot 5 of the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory’s SERAPIS framework, which is focused on the study of next-generation Simulation and Synthetic Environments, turned one in July and there was much to toast. At the time of the milestone, an impressive £1.9 million of research had been delivered and SERAPIS SSE’s membership stood at 50 strong.

This diverse and dedicated community of suppliers (page 3) had signed up to tackle a total of 28 tasks and completed 16 of these ahead of the Lot’s first anniversary.

momentum. Where the coronavirus pandemic has posed problems, parameters have been shifted and productive workarounds found.

Indeed, in the case of XPI Simulation and the UK’s contribution to a NATO Modelling and Simulation Group (pages 4-5), Covid-19 has proved a welcome examination of methods and technologies.

The restrictions of social distancing also had a positive impact on May’s virtual community of practice event.

While the business world may be growing ever weary of remote meetings in general, SERAPIS SSE’s inaugural digital discussion and debrief did not disappoint – attracting more attendees than a traditional face-toface event and, despite a near five-hour running time, saw more than 60 participants stay online for the duration.

The format also afforded the advantage of allowing international delegates, from the

YEAR 1: OF A TOTAL OF 31 TASKS TACKLED, 17 HAVE BEEN DELIVERED, 9 ARE ONGOING, 4 ARE IN SHAPING AND 1 IS A CROSS-LOT EFFORT NSC – SERAPIS SSE LEAD Web: nsc.co.uk Email: message@nsc.co.uk Tel: +44 1276 678 867 Write: River View, 2 Meadows Business Park, Camberley, Surrey, GU17 9AB

64 STRONG MEMBERSHIP PUBLISHED BY TYLERBALE COMMUNICATIONS Email: info@tylerbale.co.uk Tel: 01252 714 870 Write: 10 Borelli Yard, Farnham, Surrey GU9 7NU Content © NSC 2020. All rights reserved.

USA, Ireland, Sweden and Germany, access to proceedings.

Virtual events and other innovative means of presentation may not become SERAPIS SSE’s ‘new normal’, but there seems plenty of reason to include them in the community’s cache of communication channels moving forward.

As expressed elsewhere in this issue

by Professor Dr Petra Saskia Bayerl, research lead at the Centre of Excellence in Terrorism, Resilience, Intelligence and Organised Crime Research (pages 10-12), SERAPIS SSE serves to push boundaries and frontiers and that mission to experiment and evolve extends to its leadership.

Although a lot has been achieved, we are

£2,139,192

OF RESEARCH DELIVERED COVER Main image: MOD Crown Copyright

and, while delighted with the reception received by its debut edition, if you have any suggestions or recommendations for its future, we’d be delighted to hear them.

In the meantime, revel in the virtues of VR, marvel at the emergence of meteorological effects in simulated environments and be amazed at the advancements being made in the field of artificial intelligence algorithms.

Enjoy the issue. – Steve Yates, SERAPIS SSE Programme Director (NSC)

4 NUMBER OF ACADEMIA ON FRAMEWORK, OF WHICH 2 ARE CURRENTLY ON TASK

155 TOTAL NUMBER OF EXPRESSIONS OF INTEREST RECEIVED

300 READS OF SERAPIS SSE’S E-MAGAZINE DURING ITS LAUNCH WEEK

4C Strategies; aditerna GmbH; Agility3 Limited; Aleph Insights; Arctic Shores Limited; Arke; ATLAS ELEKTRONIK UK Ltd; BAE Maritime Services; BMT; Bright HF; C3 Systems Consulting Ltd; C3IA Solutions Limited; CACI Ltd; CENTRIC; Cervus Defence; CGI Cineon Training; Close Air Solutions; Collins Aerospace; Committed Software; Cordillera; CU Services; Cyber-Human Lab; Daden Limited; Deep Blue C Technology Ltd; Devstars; Durham University; Elbit Systems UK Ltd; Epic Games; Fleetonomy.ai; Helyx; HuSys; Inzpire; iTrinegy; LiMETOOLS; Lockheed Martin UK; Mass Consultants Ltd; Modux Ltd; Montvieux Limited; Myriad Global Media; Nova Systems UK; Pitch Technologies Ltd; PLEXSYS UK; Polystream (Elektraglide T/A); Pulse Power & Measurement Ltd; QinetiQ; Raytheon UK; Red Scientific; Riskaware Ltd; Rowden Technologies; SEA; SimCentric; Simutec Systems; Slitherine; Telespazio VEGA UK Ltd; THALES UK; Turbulent FS; University of Exeter; University of Newcastle upon Tyne; Varjo; Vedette Consulting; VRAI; Xewli; XPI Simulation

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committed to challenging the status quo and continuing to improve.

To that end, and following feedback from our members, we are seeking to streamline the expression of interest process and to better understand why some organisations have begun but not completed the Lot’s onboarding procedure.

Similarly, we remain resolute in our efforts to promote the framework to new joiners and pique the interest of non-traditional defence suppliers.

One medium for doing so is this newsletter

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THE GROWTH IN MEMBERSHIP AND PROGRESSION OF TASKS HAVE MAINTAINED MOMENTUM. WHERE THE CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC HAS POSED PROBLEMS, PARAMETERS HAVE BEEN SHIFTED AND PRODUCTIVE WORKAROUNDS FOUND

Led by simulation specialist NSC, SERAPIS SSE welcomes members from industry and academia and is open for taskings. To join those already part of our community of practice (listed below) or discuss placing a task, email SERAPIS_SSE@nsc.co.uk

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If recent online

Discover how SERAPIS SSE member XPI Simulation is working with NATO partners to help drive climate clarity

Words: Andy Simms, NSC Pictures: Crown copyright

exchanges between representatives of a NATO Modelling and Simulation Group (NMSG) are a barometer of global trends, being obsessed with talking about the weather is no longer the sole preserve of the British.

The multinational modellers – drawn from seven of the Alliance’s partner nations to form NMSG-156 Task Group – have been warming to the matter of meteorology in their pursuit of improving the representation of correlated dynamic environments within the distributed simulationbased exercises of the future.

A focus of the international research collaboration, which forms part of SERAPIS SSE’s Effective Representation of Defence Operating Environments in Simulation (ERDES) project, is evaluating and experimenting with the best methods and technologies for representing weather – and its effects – in a consistent manner across federated simulation systems.

DRIVING CHANGE XPI Simulation, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Thales in the UK, is supporting the UK technical contribution to NMSG-156, which includes integrating

real-world rainfall, wind speed and atmospheric datasets with models.

The subject matter experts from the Sussex-based designer and manufacturer of simulator systems for research applications and driver training are also attempting to accelerate the roll-out of dynamic terrain effects within synthetic environments. Being in the driver’s seat for such a study is not uncommon for XPI, which developed a prototype deformable terrain system as part of the UK’s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory’s Simulation, Composition and Representation of natural and

under that umbrella.

“Terrain datasets can include aspects such as elevation, imagery of the terrain surface, the location of road networks and surface conditions – whether the ground is wet, muddy and difficult to traverse or dry, hard and easy to drive across.

“The challenge presented by SCORE was to centrally host a dataset that contained all of this information and modify it in real-time, and serve it out in a timely manner to multiple simulation components to ensure a correlated view of the world,” he added.

“For example, if a munition detonates and destroys part of a road, the terrain data would be modified in real-time to reflect this – then all systems accessing the environment would see the same damage to the terrain at the same location. Or, if it rained heavily over an area, the terrain dataset would be updated to include rising water levels so that all systems would experience the same difficult ground conditions. It was that capability developed by XPI that is now being fed into the NMSG group to assist in exploring and building a much wider system.”

DIGITAL DIVERSION The road to doing so has been relatively smooth so far, despite

THE DREAM END GOAL IS A DISTRIBUTED SYNTHETIC ENVIRONMENT IN WHICH MULTIPLE SIMULATION SYSTEMS ARE OPERATING, ALL DRIVEN BY DYNAMIC CENTRAL TERRAIN DATA REPOSITORIES, SO THAT EVERY COMPONENT GETS A CORRELATED PICTURE OF THE ENVIRONMENT Andrew Churchward Principal Engineer, XPI Simulation

the coronavirus pandemic presenting a crater-sized pothole for the Netherlands-chaired collaboration to negotiate en route to producing a final report by the end of this year.

With COVID-19 bringing travel and the group’s quarterly face-to-face meetings to an abrupt halt, development of its experimental system was forced into the cloud in March and has since been conducted via remote integration sessions.

so that every component gets a correlated picture of the environment,” he continued.

“That goal is edging ever closer year-on-year because computing power is improving, we have the ability to store ever-increasing amounts of data, process it in a timely manner and transmit it across reliable network links.

“As all of these things continue to improve so they open up opportunities to improve the representation of

However, far from putting the brakes on progress, the change in working practices has proved a welcome examination of the group’s methods, according to Andrew.

“A lot of what we are trying to achieve is built on web technologies with the aim of being cloud-hosted, so accessing the system across the internet is an excellent test,” he said. “The German members of the group, for example, are hosting a terrain data server and we – along with our partners in the Netherlands, France, Norway and Slovenia – have been accessing that server remotely and it’s been working extremely well.”

the real world with high-fidelity effects and greater realism.

That is why it is always exciting doing this kind of research because you are able to push the boundaries and achieve the next step of realism.”

WELCOME ACCELERATION Andrew stressed that the development and rapid advancements of such technologies were integral to delivering the desired outcome of distributed, high-fidelity training environments – be it to simulators located in different geographic locations or disparate systems operating in the same simulation facility.

“The dream end goal is a distributed synthetic environment in which multiple simulation systems are operating, all driven by dynamic central terrain data repositories,

STRENGTH IN NUMBERS Equally satisfying for Andrew has been the opportunity to exchange expertise with his geographically-dispersed NATO colleagues.

“Being a member of the NMSG has been very rewarding,” he said. “It has been great to see how other nations have approached and built similar systems and I’ve learned a lot.

If anyone has the opportunity to get involved in a NATO MSG such as this I would highly recommend it.”

Of the UK’s ERDES endeavours, Dstl’s Neil Smith – who is the nominated Government representative on NMSG-156 – concluded: “Collaborating with our international partners enables the MOD to leverage significant value from our research; working as part of NMSG-156 provides future opportunities for more coherent synthetic based training of defence forces with coalition partner nations.” www.xpisimulation.com

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physical Environments (SCORE) programme [2014-2018].

“As a driving simulation company we have a great deal of experience in developing synthetic systems that represent the real world underpinned by real-world terrain datasets,” Andrew Churchward, a principal engineer at XPI told Conduit.

“This expertise lent itself to SCORE and our involvement in SERAPIS SSE really stems from the research we conducted

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FEATURE

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THE HUNT IS ON Take a ‘deep dive’ into Montvieux’s mission to turn a staple of science fiction into military reality using a computer-propelled submarine Words: Andy Simms, NSC Pictures: David Mark from Pixabay, Montvieux and vpnsrus.com (image p8)

FOR students of cinema, the concept of Artificial Intelligence (AI) being used in military wargaming must seem positively passé.

It has, after all, been almost four decades since theatre audiences first watched WarGames, a film in which a young hacker cracks into a supercomputer programmed to predict possible outcomes of a nuclear conflict and inadvertently brings the world to the brink of Armageddon.

And in the years since the Cold War classic’s release, machine

vision and learning have been a mainstay of movies, with box-office hits such as The Matrix, I, Robot and Avengers all exploring the possibilities – and perils – of AI. Reality, however, has remained firmly in the shadows of science fiction and the silver screen.

Until now.

TAKING THE PLUNGE A SERAPIS SSE tasking, delivered by machine intelligence experts from Montvieux earlier this year, represented a significant stride forward in Defence

efforts to close the capability gap between fact and film.

The project – The Hunting of the PLARK – saw the creation of an open AI game environment that replicates a desk-top, turn-based wargame in which a submarine must try to evade being detected and destroyed by a maritime patrol aircraft.

Rather than having a human decide where to move the “hunter” and its “prey”, Montvieux trained a pair of reinforcement learning algorithms to master the roles – and their respective game-

our international partners,” Andrew Wire, Technical Director at Montvieux, told Conduit, explaining the lag between screenwriters’ creations and real-world advancements.

“The advantage Hollywood

ALTHOUGH THERE MAY HAVE BEEN SUPER AMBITIONS FOR AI AND HOW IT’S GOING TO CHANGE THE WORLD IN FILMS, IT HAS ACTUALLY TAKEN A WHILE FOR MATHS AND ENGINEERING TO CATCH UP Andrew Wire Technical director, Montvieux

has had is that it is probably 10 to 15 years ahead in terms of where technology actually is. So although there may have been super ambitions for AI and how it’s going to change the world in films, it has actually taken a while for maths and engineering to catch up.

“In truth, we are probably still a bit behind the stuff you might see in 24 or whatever else you’re watching on Netflix, but where we have broken ground internationally is in the adversarial training of Hunting of the PLARK’s two agents,” he added. “The fact that you can train the submarine to try to beat the aircraft at the same time as training the aircraft to

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winning strategies – in tandem.

The software, and its supporting documentation, were developed to be used as a testbed for exploring the application and optimisation of AI models in military training and will be the subject of a hackathon during the coming months.

“We really are at the foothills of how AI can support wargaming; and that is not just true of Dstl in the UK but also

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FEATURE

beat the submarine is a real step forward.”

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CONSOLE CATALYST While movies and television have long held the monopoly on imagining AI applications, it is another sector of the entertainment business that is behind the recent surge in development, according to Andrew. “The real driver for the machine learning revolution is the computer games industry,” the physicist said.

“There is a constant demand for more realistic games and in order to get amazingly rendered graphics you need really good graphics cards.

“As a consequence, companies like NVIDIA have been developing better and better cards to perform 3D renders, ray tracing, texture mapping and all the stuff you need to happen in your next-generation consoles to support super realistic games.

“And the great thing about these graphic cards, and specifically the processor units on them, is that they are essentially big calculators that operate at a blindingly quick speed and are really good at doing the kind of maths and sums machine learning models require. You now have this

WE ARE TRYING TO CREATE A NEURAL NETWORK – TO REPLICATE WHAT GOES ON IN THE HUMAN BRAIN Andrew Wire Technical director, Montvieux

beautiful coming together of maths and software engineering improving with – thanks to the games industry driving down the costs – the availability of components capable of running advanced algorithms on.”

QUICK LEARNERS Hunting of the PLARK’s protagonists may have been

given a nudge in the right direction by videogame technology but the machine intelligence maestros at Montvieux have provided them with a significantly more in-depth education than their console contemporaries.

“In a videogame there is a rules-based model that governs the behaviour of the bad guys,” Andrew added. “We don’t tell our reinforcement learning models what to do, we tell them the rules of the environment and the game and the models then learn strategies for themselves.

“If I sat a human down in front of a game they’ve never played before and simply explained that the objective is to get the bad guys before they get them, they would feel their way around the game and do a bit of reinforcement learning in their own head.

“They would learn how the environment works, develop strategies through trial and error and try to master those that work and discard those that don’t.

“That is what we are doing with machine learning – we are trying to create a neural network, to replicate what goes on in the human brain. The beauty of machine learning is you can run those trials at many, many thousands of times faster than real-time and potentially, in some cases, run those trials parallel to each other.

“These algorithms learn incredibly quickly and the trick is observing the performance of the learning to ensure it doesn’t get stuck in a local minima where the algorithm thinks it’s mastered the game but has actually parked itself in a culde-sac and there might be some

better strategies for it to adopt.”

WELL-BEHAVED TECH Contrary to cinematic clichés of rogue robots and AI programmes running amok in an attempt to seize control of civilisation, improving machine intelligence in wargaming is not a precursor to any form of Doomsday scenario.

And nor are exercising troops likely to see any unpredictable tactics being deployed by any AI adversary on the virtual battlefields of the future.

“It is a question of the science of war versus the art of war,” Andrew, who cofounded Montvieux in 2007, said. “Machines learn from the behaviours they observe in their training dataset so if you don’t include examples of weird or unusual things happening – those moments of operational

WE SHOULD BE USING MACHINES TO DO WHAT THEY ARE GOOD AT, WHICH IS THE HEAVY LIFTING. SO IF THE BULK OF WHAT HAPPENS WITHIN A WARGAME IS PREDICTABLE AND DRIVEN BY CONCEPTS AND DOCTRINE, THEN WHY NOT LET THE MACHINE DO THAT? Andrew Wire Technical director, Montvieux

“To train a core group of six people you might need 30 more people to play adversaries or other actors and audiences within the game environment; to react to inputs or create inputs.

“That is why Dstl is keen to establish what role AI techniques, and specifically machine learning, could have in making wargaming more accessible, realistic, richer, effective and efficient.

“We should be using machines to do what they are good at, which is the heavy lifting. So if the bulk of what happens within a wargame is predictable and driven by concepts and doctrine, then why not let the machine do that?”

The field of machine intelligence may not attract Montvieux any Academy Awards or lead to any red carpet walks, but Andrew is very clear as to the reward of supporting Dstl and the SERAPIS SSE framework.

“We are here to put capability into the hands of military users in order to make our country and our people safe,” he concluded.

“We take immense pride in our outputs and the fact that they support the defence and national security mission.” www.montvieux.com

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art outside of normal military doctrine – then you can’t expect your machine learning algorithm to demonstrate them in a wargame.”

Although the prospect of pitching tomorrow’s generals against a maverick mega-mind is off the agenda, AI has the potential to deliver the military a major training advantage.

“At the moment wargaming is a manpower intensive process,” explained Andrew.

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FEATURE

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GAME CHANGER AT first glance, the CV of

From mobile gaming to serious simulations, CENTRIC specialist Jonathan Saunders shares his views on the virtues of virtual reality

Words: Andy Simms, NSC Pictures: Courtesy of CENTRIC

Jonathan Saunders looks to be one of extreme contrasts.

A graduate of the so-called PlayStation Generation – members of which were ironically pilloried by the press for damaging their job prospects as a result of being glued to console controllers – his early career credits include bringing zombie hordes and robots to the railways as a junior programmer on mobile game Storm the Train.

But fast forward five years and Jonathan’s passion and talent for developing digital domains has taken him down a very different track. Rather than tweaking artificial intelligence and audio for a side-scrolling shoot ‘em up, he is now more likely to be found finessing virtual and augmented reality solutions to help first responders react to scenarios such as a terrorist attack at an underground station.

As the lead serious games developer for SERAPIS SSE member CENTRIC [Centre

THERE HAS BEEN A LOT OF RESEARCH INTO HOW FUTURE BUSINESS LEADERS ARE MOULDED BY PLAYING TITLES SUCH AS WORLD OF WARCRAFT AND I REALISED THAT TRANSFERRING MY SKILLS AND KNOWLEDGE OVER TO A MORE SERIOUS GAMES FOCUS COULD HELP DELIVER TRAINING OUTCOMES Jonathan Saunders Lead serious games developer, CENTRIC

of Excellence in Terrorism, Resilience, Intelligence and Organised Crime Research] at Sheffield Hallam University, Jonathan routinely runs projects for major international organisations such as Europol and NATO in addition to managing and developing an array of in-house training platforms for law enforcement agencies.

His skills, and those of his colleagues, are also bolstering SERAPIS SSE’s scan of the technological horizon; contributing to the MoD’s MIITTE [Maximising the Impact of Immersive Technology for Training and Education] research programme and Dstl’s creation of a standard framework for evaluation of the efficacy of new systems.

SWITCH IN FOCUS The change in professional direction from commercial gaming to counter-terrorism training is not, however, as dramatic as it sounds for

FEATURE

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CENTRIC’s back catalogue: Left, ATLAS IOM – a civilian training tool built for the International Organisation for Migration, which uses VR to help prepare its staff for dealing with emergency situations in the field; Right and below, AUGGMED – a counter-terrorism training simulation designed to enable multi-agency large scale scenarios to be conducted using desktop, virtual and augmented reality devices.

someone who has always taken games seriously, according to Jonathan.

“At CENTRIC one of our main objectives is integrating the benefits of learning that you can get from games with the understanding from academic pedagogy to ensure people both enjoy training and attain the necessary knowledge,” he explained. “It’s an interesting challenge but, from my own perspective, I know I have learned a lot just from playing normal games.

“There has been a lot of research into how future business leaders are moulded by playing titles such as World of Warcraft and I realised that transferring my skills and knowledge over to a more serious games focus could help deliver training outcomes.

“If we can steer organisations away from more traditional e-learning – online clickthrough tools – to something a bit more interactive then the learning is more intrinsic.

“The process of creating a video game and virtual training system is actually quite similar; you are still playing with your users’ emotions,” Jonathan added. “If you build a game that is too intense people burn out – they get frustrated, stop being able to operate functionally and do not enjoy themselves.

“The same is true of virtual reality (VR) training and a similar process goes into developing and designing your level structure and play-through progression.

“I may want someone to feel frustrated by challenging their knowledge and capability, but I know that I don’t want them to burn out of the training too early and so need to provide some downtime – be it by lowering the intensity of the scenario or breaking for a debrief.”

EMERGING SOLUTION Although his own transition from handheld games to headsets has encountered very

THE PROCESS OF CREATING A VIDEO GAME AND VIRTUAL TRAINING SYSTEM IS ACTUALLY QUITE SIMILAR; YOU ARE STILL PLAYING WITH YOUR USERS’ EMOTIONS Jonathan Saunders Lead serious games developer, CENTRIC

little buffering or technical bugs, the same is not true of the field he finds himself working in. Despite its emergence in the 1980s, VR has only recently begun to feature on the radar of the security sector as a potential means of delivering training.

But Jonathan, who was CENTRIC lead for AUGGMED – an international collaboration to develop remote, multi-agency virtual reality training scenarios – believes the technology’s time to shine has come.

“Similar to the story of computers, as we manage to shrink technology down it becomes more accessible and usable and that is why people are now seriously considering how VR can be used,” he said. “While VR used to mean wearing clunky kit on your head which restricted movement, now, rather than having a 2D screen attached to your face, we are getting stereoscopic vision that enables us to judge depth and speed as we move.

“Advancements in technologies have opened up new doorways that simply

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Serious gaming: Left, Cyber Centric – a cyber safety awareness solution for business leaders which was developed alongside the Yorkshire and Humber Cyber Crime Unit; Below, Cryptopol – cryptocurrency investigator training game, built in collaboration with Europol, which requires trainees to utilise real tools and methods to investigate the blockchain.

weren’t accessible for the first iterations of VR.” Citing a crime scene investigation simulation – developed by RiVR [Reality in VR] and the subject of a recent SERAPIS SSE efficacy study – as an example of the evolution, Jonathan said the use of photogrammetry to create photo-realistic, high-fidelity training environments was an exciting prospect.

“Visually you can now replicate quite a lot,” he enthused. “The main benefits of a system like RiVR, however, are the ability to set up a scenario within a matter of minutes and immediately reset that scenario at any point in time.

“Real-world exercises can demand a lot of resources and some physical locations, such as airports, can’t simply be shut down for training. With VR I can create a digital copy of what I want and train multiple personnel without the need of considerable support staff.

“VR technology won’t replace traditional police or military training but it can certainly supplement it significantly. One of the biggest limitations at the moment is not the technology

but people’s confidence in it to deliver training.”

ACADEMIC ACUMEN

THE IDEA IS TO CREATE AN UNDERLYING FRAMEWORK, A GOLD STANDARD IN SYSTEM DESIGN AND TESTING, THAT WILL SHAPE HOW OTHER PARTNERS CONDUCT THEIR STUDIES AND THAT WHATEVER IS DONE GOING FORWARD IS DONE IN THE MOST EFFICIENT AND EFFECTIVE MANNER Professor Dr Petra Saskia Bayerl Research lead, CENTRIC

Instilling that confidence is a key component of CENTRIC’s contribution to SERAPIS SSE and one spearheaded by Jonathan’s colleague Professor Dr Petra Saskia Bayerl.

“My role is taking any research and ensuring that any recommendations are grounded in academic quality,” she said.

“There is a lot of effort involved in trials and evaluations and we want to help ensure that any future studies are done in such a way that they generate real value and systems we can do something with.

“The idea is to create an underlying framework, a gold standard in system design and testing, that will shape how other partners conduct their studies and that whatever is done going forward is done in the most efficient and effective manner.”

With masters degrees in psychology, linguistics and organisational dynamics and a PhD in industrial design engineering, Professor Bayerl’s expertise lies in evaluation

rather than Android and IOS gaming but she insists academic analysis is not out to curb creativity or temper technological advancements.

Highlighting that the interdisciplinary composition of CENTRIC’s staff mirrors the make up and modus operandi of SERAPIS SSE’s diverse community of practice, she concluded: “Academia is always interested in understanding ‘so what does this mean now?; what are the next steps and what are the impacts of doing something? We tend to ask a lot of questions and have a different way of looking at innovation to a practitioner, who is often concerned with how do we apply this and what’s the next tweak I can make?

“As an academic I want to know why is this better and why is VR better and more effective in some cases and not others? Navigating these two tensions is something CENTRIC can guide on but we are only asking different questions; we share similar interests and are working to push similar boundaries and frontiers.

“The partnership between academics and practitioners will propel SERAPIS SSE forward.” research.shu.ac.uk/centric