The Impact Lab is a partnership of seven world class Devon based organisations. The partnership comprises the University of Exeter, Exeter City Futures, the Met Office, the University of Plymouth, Plymouth College of Art, Plymouth Marine Laboratory, and Rothamsted Research. The Impact Lab is part-funded by the European Regional Development Fund: Total funding is £6.4 million.

The heart of what the Impact Lab offers is resource for collaborative projects to help businesses solve a key technical challenge in the development of a new product, service or process.

The Immersive Vision Theatre is the core resource to support the Impact Lab and i-DAT brings its skills in data harvesting and visualisation and simulation to delivery innovative solutions to real – (future) world problems.

The Impact Lab builds on four key i-DAT research themes:

Quorum – Cultural Computation: 

Quorum proposes new analytical techniques for enhancing engagement through the use of conversational AI, Artificial Neural Networks, Self Organising Maps and Deep Learning Networks to innovatively integrate subjective and objective data.

Small-Faraway: 

Big, little and smaller data (Macro-Meso-Micro), explores the harvesting, analytics, visualisation and sonification of data. This research investigates techniques to capture data from an instrumentalised world.

Behaviourables & Futuribles:

i-DAT’s creative interventions into the realms of the Internet of Things, remote sensors, robotics, Props and Wearables (everywareables?) has established a rich framework for investigating the emergent properties of things that sense and like to talk about it.

Immersive Environments: 

The development of meaningful experiences in digitally enhanced physical, augmented and virtual spaces through interventions in urban & rural environments, augmentation using real-time data and immersive virtual environments.