BT brings the holodeck to life with Immersive Spaces

BT Group has launched a new immersive spaces offering in an effort to bring alive virtual and augmented reality experiences for education and enterprises.

Division X – part of the British telco’s enterprise unit – unveiled its new immersive product at a press event in London last week. The Immersive Spaces are interactive environments which can be used for training, entertainment, education, or digital twin use cases.

At the launch, UK tech journalists were shown the “mobile” immersive unit, which was a prefabricated building that can be packed up and transported on the back of a flatbed truck to wherever it is needed.

So, what is it? When deployed – BT claims this can take as little as an hour to set-up – the immersive space is essentially a room with three touchscreen walls (plus an option to turn the floor into a screen) which are powered by projectors to simulate pre-produced or live content.

The room itself has the feel of a less advanced “holodeck” from sci-fi staple Star Trek, although you are limited by the size of the room.

BT Division X director Alex Foster was excited to demonstrate one simulation that allowed you to swim with whales. Primarily for educational purposes, users could create bubbles by touching the walls or tapping on the whales themselves to learn more about the creatures.

We were then transported to space, with an interactive map of the solar system that also included quiz elements designed for school children.

Foster said BT has already had an open day with local schools, with children responding well to the immersive experience. It can also benefit children with additional learning needs.

Initial customers for BT Immersive Spaces include Borders College in Galashiels, Scotland and Cadoxton Primary School in South Wales. Both are using the technology to create fully immersive and interactive classrooms.

“The children absolutely love it,” said Hannah Cogbill, senior leadership at Cadoxton Primary School. “Their favourite one so far is life under the sea. We can’t wait to explore more of the experiences and collections and then begin to develop our own content. We are looking forward to using it to support our children’s development and progression of imaginative writing. But it will also be a great scaffold to support learners with pre-experiences that they might be nervous about – for example catching a train or going on an airplane.”

But the project isn’t just for the education sector, with enterprises also potentially benefitting from the space, BT claims. One example shown was a forklift truck being driven around a recorded factor floor. Rather than training new drivers on-site where there is greater risk, the partner involved had built a model forklift truck that users could control to familiarise themselves with the environment. This was then put inside the space, where the three dimensional experience could come to life.

BT said it is experiencing early demand for training and development use cases across education, healthcare, retail, transport, tourism, construction and sport – creating virtual experiences inside operating theatres, buses, warehouses, supermarkets, building sites and arenas.

Each space comes with a content library of more than 3,000 computer-generated scenarios, real-life environments, games and training experiences. BT Immersive Spaces can be used for anything from training paramedics in a simulated, gamified roadside accident scene or hospital unit, to recreating fan experiences at a football match, important historical moments, or even a trip to a beach in Thailand. The spaces are also compatible with VR, AR and XR technologies to enhance the user experience.

Launched in partnership with Immersive Interactive Ltd, BT Immersive Spaces leverages subsidiary EE’s 4G and 5G mobile network, but can also be powered by Wi-Fi if in a fixed location. It is being sold as an end-to-end offering, while allowing customers to edit and create interactive content of their choice. As well as a pre-populated content library, this includes the option to film, edit and even live stream their own videos using a 360° camera, supplied by BT.

It is being led by BT’s Division X, which is part of the UK company’s Business division, which formed out of the combination of BT Enterprise and BT Global in December. It is focussed on delivering solutions for enterprise customers.

Ian Robertson, technical principal at Division X, noted that the unit is looking into “different ways of actually travelling within the metaverse, different sorts of technology for hand tracking, for example, and also bringing in the power of things like edge compute as well to make sure that we actually have enhanced processing power to really take those experiences up to the next level.”