Immersive experience company Disguise has received £1.2m in funding from Innovate UK and the EU as part of a larger investment into MAX-R — an alliance of companies dedicated to advancing virtual production, extended reality, virtual reality and metaverse technologies.

The MAX-R alliance — which is made up of Disguise, the BBC, ARRI, Improbable, Brainstorm, Foundry, FilmLight, The University of Hasselt, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, CREW and FilmAkademie Baden-Wurtumberg — has already announced its first developments.

2. Disguise

Immersive experience company Disguise has received £1.2m in funding from Innovate UK and the EU

For Disguise, these are primarily focused on streamlining productions so that filmmakers, live events experts, and broadcasters can use immersive technologies with fewer licence requirements and other costs. Disguise said this would open up the creative possibilities for mid-to-low budget productions, helping to make virtual production and extended reality technology available to projects including shorts, ads and corporate presentations.

Disguise’s new MAX-R technology developments include RSConnect which connects live events to metaverse platforms using a new protocol that allows for the transfer of audio, visual media and metadata from Disguise’s Designer into a third-party system.

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Other developments include Depth Reprojection which captures more exciting cinematography on a virtual production set by improving depth estimations, and OCIO which defines colour space on a virtual production set, helping integrate shots into visual effects pipelines.

Other tools are Reimaging 2.0 to reduce downtime when configuring media servers and Porta to enhance the level of control available to on-set operators with software that offers more experimental transitions, scheduling and content manipulation options.

“MAX-R will offer exciting new opportunities to broaden the way creators and audiences craft, present and interact with digital realities,” says Disguise Chief Collaboration Officer Abi Bowman. “By offering an array of tools to streamline existing ways of working or facilitate exciting new ones, we’re making sure that the next generation of content creators have the tools they need to make the virtual world look and feel as real as the physical one.”

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