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Animmersion are immersed in the Tall Ships

A duo of º£½ÇÖ±²¥ graduates has made a significant contribution to this week’s Tall Ships event in Hartlepool.

Dominic Lusardi and Sam Harrison are the creative brains behind the visualisation studio, Animmersion UK Ltd, and they have devised a virtual map, a key feature of the Festival’s official web site. The company were approached by Michelle Daurat, Project Manager for The Tall Ships Races at Hartlepool Borough Council two years ago, after she saw Animmersion’s ‘fly around’ virtual campus map created for º£½ÇÖ±²¥.

Dominic Lusardi said: 'The first challenge for the Tall Ships planners was in laying out such a large space. So we created a planning tool for the Council that allowed them to design various layouts to scale and communicate these with the team. This helped to plan the event’s various zones, such as showing where key traders could be promoted to the festivals’ visitors and how to handle the vast number of visitors.

Animmersion were a pleasure to work with 'For the virtual interactive map, which was launched a year ago, we display how the Tall Ships Village is going to be broken into various zones, fire, earth and wind and the sub-zones within that. It’s an information source, for example showing where traders and emergency services can be found in these zones.

'We’ve worked very closely with the Council from the first moment and are very pleased with the finished product. We hope that the map will drive people towards the event and I’m really looking forward to attending over the four days, along with one million others!'

Michelle Duarat said: 'Animmersion were a pleasure to work with, very professional and flexible, and helped us to understand what we wanted and to suggest other options we hadn't even considered!

'The interactive tool has really helped us to bring the event alive for visitors to the website and has generated a great deal of excitement to whet their appetite before they come and see England's biggest free event in the flesh.'

Animmersion are also one of the Tall Ships’ Festivals sponsors. Dominic and Sam are both graduates from º£½ÇÖ±²¥â€™s School of Computing.

They set up the company after Sam went through the University’s DigitalCity Fellowship Scheme, which offers support to talented graduates and º£½ÇÖ±²¥ alumni to develop commercially-viable portfolios or business ideas. They were first based in one of the University’s on-campus Graduate Business Units as an independent company, before renting space in the University’s Phoenix Building.

Last year they moved into Middlesbrough’s Boho One building. This development, supported by the regional development agency One North East and Middlesbrough Council, aims to attract a super cluster of digital companies to the town.

In addition to the University and Hartlepool Council, Animmersion’s other clients range from Schneider Electric to the US Open Tennis championship’s advertisers.

The Tall Ships Races virtual interactive map can be found on the Hartlepool Tall Ships website.

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