Dave Robson talks to Animmersion founder about how the business grew

In today’s rapidly changing world, the advance of technology and AI looks an unstoppable force. Many sectors need to get to grips with it, or an already existing skills gap will continue to widen.

And helping bridge that gap by using immersive technologies is one of the key tasks adopted by a pioneer of Teesside’s thriving tech scene.

Since 2005, Animmersion has taken the digital techniques of the entertainment industry and skilfully adapted them to work in various sectors.

At its modern, hi-tech yet homely base in Middlesbrough’s Boho district, a 21-strong team of technical and creative developers dreams up and refines a mind-boggling array of interactive 3D content, cutting-edge immersive tech and engaging interactive software.

One moment, staff can be seen intently studying their screens, the next they’re wandering around wearing VR headsets.

This clearly isn’t a boring, or conventional, place to work.

Its clients are many and varied – from industrial and manufacturing to education, healthcare, architecture and construction, the public sector and more.

And the general aim, says founder and CEO Sam Harrison, has barely changed since the company launched – to immerse, inspire and educate the next generation.

He told BusinessIQ: ‘If you go back 20 years, we were, I suppose, content enthusiasts. My aim in setting up the business was to take some of the techniques of the entertainment sector but think about how we could apply them seriously. And I think for us now, the content is a smaller piece of the puzzle. The bigger piece is the consultation, the understanding of what the aims and objectives are and picking the right piece of technology. So, it may not be a VR headset, it may be that we do some augmented reality or it may sometimes just be an animation – as long as it engages people and gets the right messages across.’

Alongside Sam for most of the Animmersion journey has been the company’s chief design officer, Andy Liddell – the first fellow student Sam met when coming from Nottingham, where he was born and raised, to Teesside University in 1997 to study for a visualisation degree.

Then, as now, they were singing from the same tech hymn sheet – and they remain focused on using it to enhance society and close the skills gap.

Andy said: ‘A lot of people, certainly academic institutions, colleges and schools, are getting on board with this type of tech. To them, it’s new, but to us it’s established and maturing fast, so we’re able to help them get the most out of it.

‘But in the discussions we’ve had with educators, there are skills gaps – not just with the people going through college at the moment, who need to be savvy with electric vehicles or wind farm technology or something, but with the teachers and tutors too.

‘So, with the things we do, and have been doing for years, now is the time we can use those technologies and our experience to help fill that skills gap. They’re all being used to help in training and in the development of companies ability to do things.’

Before reflecting on the firm’s evolution, Sam and Andy flag up several sectors Animmersion is helping.

Just up the A19, for example, near Nissan’s Washington factory, is Unipres – a company that produces pressed and assembled steel parts for the automotive industry.

Unipres operates several large cranes – not the easiest equipment to train people on. Unless, of course, you use virtual reality.

Andy explained: ‘Training somebody on the overhead cranes could be dangerous and get in the way of production. So, we spoke to them eight or nine years ago and said we could use our technology to create a virtual simulation of the factory and the crane, so they could train the crane people in a different room, away from the dangers, away from the kit and away from production.’

Developed by Animmersion’s team of 3D modellers, immersive content in a VR headset puts the wearer in a ‘factory’ populated by various potential obstacles and hazards – and, crucially, in charge of the ‘virtual’ crane.

More recently, Unipres also wanted a portable VR headset to take to careers fairs and let youngsters try. Andy explained: ‘It’s as if you’re in the factory – you can go into the production area, see all the robots working, hear it all, it’s like you’re there. 

‘Basically, it gives young people access to places they wouldn’t normally get access to, so they can explore what it’s like to work there and learn about what goes on without ever visiting.’

Other examples of Animmersion’s work include a project developed in Scotland with the Offshore Renewable Catapult and Heriot-Watt University and other partners showing young college students what it’s like being a wind turbine engineer – potentially giving them an eye-opening insight, heights and all, before committing to training they might not be cut out for.

In North Yorkshire, with Local Skills Improvement Fund support, Animmersion has helped colleges work together to produce an interactive regional careers map, giving young people an idea what it might be like working in such sectors as healthcare, life sciences, computer programming, agriculture, construction, GP practices and care homes. 

At Darlington College, Animmersion has provided a bespoke solution for automotive and engineering students to give them exercises in such tasks as correct PPE selection or identifying workplace hazards.

In addition, an immersive room, where images are projected onto all four walls and even the floor, literally puts students in the middle of the topic they’re studying. And that doesn’t have to be a tech topic – English lessons based on the literature of the First and Second World Wars, for example, impressed the college so much, it sent a video to Animmersion to say so.

And at the very hi-tech end of the scale, the next generation of healthcare and engineering professionals are now being trained using the latest immersive technology following a £3m investment at Coventry University. 

Funded from a £5m grant from the Office for Students, and supplied by Animmersion and Teesside firm ArtAV, the university’s new VR CAVE suite has a huge simulation screen wrapped around three walls on which different healthcare settings and scenarios are simulated, while students can also interact with simulated patients by using 3D headsets.

All projects of which Animmersion can be rightly proud – but where does AI fit into the equation?

Sam explained: ‘We’re not shy of it – we’re using it across the company, but we’re using it carefully and transparently. We have a really bright recruit who’s joined us from from Middlesbrough College, who is now building AI applications for us, which he’ll be using with colleges. He’s only 18 and he is going to be educating the educators.

‘One of the things we can do, for example, when looking at creating educational content, is avoiding the bottleneck of trying to get that content from the teacher or the subject matter expert. These people know what they’re talking about but downloading all of that is hard, so we can use AI to do a first draft and then work with them around that. That optimises the process of knowledge extraction. Rather than extracting it, we can generate it and then modify it with them.

‘However, we always need a human in the loop, validating that it’s correct. One thing that scares me a bit about AI is people just trusting what’s being output. So, it’s thinking carefully about the technology and its application, but having a human in the loop all the time.

‘The challenge is also the sophistication of the audience – they may not have the critical ability necessary to spot if what they’re receiving isn’t high quality. Hence, we’re the human in the loop to validate the quality, even if it has been created by AI.’

Since inception, Animmersion has worked with around 1,500 clients. Last year, it posted a £3.7m turnover.

Its client base is varied, although industry and education feature strongly. Sam smiled: ‘Interestingly, we find a lot of what we do involves things travelling through pipes.’

But is Animmersion what he envisaged when starting out on his tech journey? A schoolboy ‘creative digital enthusiast’, his youthful enthusiasm was encouraged by an Amiga 3D graphics package called Imagine, allowing him to develop his digital art and 3D skills.

There was even a TV programme that fired his imagination – US “space opera” series Babylon 5. He recalls: “It was one of the first TV programmes with computer graphics in it, all done with Amiga 4000s, so that was quite an inspiration. I had lots of interest in various technologies but it was really around animation, film and virtual reality. And interestingly, what we do now is animation, film and virtual reality, mixed with hardware, but with a much more grown-up approach in terms of engaging with industry and education and trying to unlock the value for everybody.”

After his degree, he honed his skills at Teesside University’s trailblazing VR Centre – a government-funded centre for excellence run by, he says, “an absolute luminary”, the late Janice Webster.

When the centre closed in 2004, he started freelance work – but the Animmersion fire was burning.

In 2006, the company was founded and in 2009, moved into its office in Boho One – the flagship building of Middlesbrough’s Boho Zone, which now comprises several buildings housing some of Teesside’s most talented creatives.

But when Sam set Animmersion up, what did he tell people it was? “I had a couple of slogans. We were bridging the technical creative divide with digital media so we could be creative and technical at the same time. And I would have told you that we were taking the techniques of the entertainment sector and applying them for serious purposes.”

In those early days, Sam and Andy briefly flirted with the social media network world. He recalls: ‘We had a side company that we pitched to the BBC and Channel 4, but E4 took all the budget! They were exciting days, though, going down to London and pitching these various social media things. I think we might have even been ahead of Facebook in terms of our ideas. 

‘We pitched concepts – for example, I was convinced that a company that could 3D model the planet would do very well. Obviously, Google did that with Google Earth, but we could see all of those things. But being in Middlesbrough and not Silicon Valley was a bit of a different proposition, although things have changed now.’

They certainly have. It’s widely recognised that Teesside is one of the UK’s most exciting and innovative tech hubs – and Sam is determined to keep Animmersion ahead of the game, as it has been since the early days.

Uniquely positioned between industry, education and academia, it already has a rich history of working across sectors explaining complex products and processes for business development and training.

It works extensively with colleges and universities, participating in academic research and delivering groundbreaking immersive opportunities.

And through its range of animation, interactives and XR (extended reality) services, it can transfer knowledge to educational practitioners – educating the educators, if you like.

Sam said: ‘I think we stand in a really interesting position between education and industry and we’ve got an opportunity to link those two things.

‘The thing that’s really exciting me at the minute is the skills gap challenge. Technology is running away really fast, so how do we make sure people can engage with that technology? I think we use technology to do that, but we need to have humans in the loop.

‘All of this technology is fantastic, but the most important thing to me is the team here and our ability to engage with industrial people, educators, the users, the learners, and work out what the optimal use of our technology is. And that’s different platforms, it’s different software. Sometimes we’re buying off-the-shelf software and deploying it, other times we’re writing our own. It’s really a mix of things.

‘And a lot of this is about knowledge transfer. We often forget there’s a lot of stuff that we find second nature, but it’s magic to many people and we can get them there. We’ve just got to work with them and understand what they’re trying to achieve and then we can show them how to do it.’

A few days after our chat, Sam and the team were heading to Barcelona to mingle with movers and shakers and show corporate clients some of their latest trailblazing content.

But then it was back to the day job – using and developing immersive technology to transform and enhance the way people interact with information and the world around them.

And all from an office near Middlesbrough railway station.

Sam said: ‘I guess what we’re most excited about at the moment is addressing those skills gaps and the challenges the nation faces in that respect by immersing, inspiring and educating the next generation.

‘We’ve got that history of working across sectors, delivering complex visualisations of products and processes, business development and training. We do a lot of work, participating with and working with academics. So potentially, we could be working with them on, for example, research projects around neurodiversity, or research projects around the acceptance of autonomous vehicles – building VR scenarios so they can test things out with their cohorts.

‘But a key thing for us right now is educating the educators, helping them to leverage this technology, and then looking at what the right solution is for different organisations. What we try and do is make that simple and easy for our customers, which is hard but it’s doable.

‘We were ahead of the game when we started and I think we still are. We’re looking at the next generation of technologies right now.

‘I suppose what surprises me, but it’s always what I thought would happen, is that it’s accelerating away, and AI is just accelerating it faster. The challenge now is for tutors, students, young people and businesses to keep up with that acceleration – and that’s where we come in.’