Mixed Reality Laboratory

The MRL was first established in 1999 with £1.2M funding under the JREI programme and its facilities were updated in 2005 through a further £1M under SRIF 2. The laboratory is currently home to over fifty academics, Research Associates/Fellows and PhD students who are undertaking a wide ranging programme of research into mixed reality and its applications. Between 2000 and 2007 the MRL has been the lead partner in EPSRC’s Equator IRC, a £10M, eight partner, initiative exploring the interweaving of physical and digital interaction for everyday life. More recently, the MRL has spearheaded the establishment of the Horizon Digital Economy Institute, together with the Horizon Centre for Doctoral Training, funded by grants totalling £19 million from Research Councils UK. It is aimed to establish these as world-leading centres of excellence for innovation and knowledge transfer in the ubiquitous digital economy.

Our research is grounded in a user-centred approach, in which we build on a deep technical expertise in interaction and distributed systems design to rapidly prototype new interactive technologies, and employ multiple evaluation techniques, ranging from ethnographic studies to simulator experiments, to understand how these are experienced by people in the real world. Our research is therefore highly interdisciplinary, striving to integrate perspectives from Computer Science, Sociology, Psychology, Human Factors and Art and Design.