Bournemouth University

17,000 students attend the university, including 1,500 international students from over 130 countries. BU achieved the EcoCampus Gold Award. BU has run 26 awarded EC projects with a total budget of over €5M. The 2014 Research Excellence Framework exercise, which covers all UK HE institutions, showed that over 70% of our research impact has been deemed to be outstanding (4*) or very considerable (3*).

BU is home to the National Centre for Computer Animation (NCCA), recognised as the best place in the UK to study computer animation and visual effects. The NCCA has been at the forefront of computer graphics and animation education and research in the UK since 1989. The National Centre for Computer Animation (NCCA) is the No.1 UK research and education base for computer animation, winner of the most prestigious award for higher education institutions in the UK – the Queen’s Anniversary Prize (Diamond Jubilee Round in 2012). The NCCA has been successful in developing vigorous and on-going close relationships with the animation, games and film visual effects industries, which is one of the key reasons for the NCCA to host the project. Many of NCCA’s graduates and staff members have led and contributed to the production of Oscar winning films (such as Avatar, Interstellar, Gravity and Ex Machina). It has established an Industrial Advisory Board consisting of practitioners from leading VFX companies around the world, such as Industrial Light and Magic, Disney, Sony and MPC. The links with industry and collaboration experiences are unique and extremely valuable: the project will generate outputs and documents to benefit the industry through the existing channels. The NCCA has produced a large number of peer reviewed publications including numerous published at SIGGRAPH.

Jointly with other partners, BU is leading the ‘Digital Content’ development in the VISTA-AR project, to deliver related outputs. BU is contributing to the development and usage of the digital content, including 3D geometric models, texture and material appearance, character riggings, scene settings and computer animation clips, which will be fed to other linked research activities and provide immersive VR/AR experience in this project.

The project leader at BU is Prof Jian Chang, who has been an experienced scientist in the world-leading centre, the NCCA. Other team members include; Prof Jian J Zhang, Dr Xiaosong Yang and Dr Ehtzaz Chaudhry.