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North East collaboration develops new cutting edge app for events

A collaboration between Newcastle software house Nebula Labs and º£½ÇÖ±²¥ has resulted in the launch of an innovative events app that uses the latest Augmented Reality (AR).

Nebula Labs had already built a successful app used in major regional events such as Newcastle Startup Week and Newcastle’s International Film Festival. The team were keen to explore using cutting edge technology to develop the app further and be able to offer an even more innovative tool for event organisers and visitors. Nebula Labs partnered up with º£½ÇÖ±²¥ as part of GX Collaborate – a legacy project from the Great Exhibition of the North led by NewcastleGateshead Initiative and Innovation SuperNetwork.

Dylan McKee, Nebula Labs Co-founder said: 'The project was for SMEs wanting to collaborate with a research organisation to develop a new product or process. We were keen to develop our already popular events app, to use cutting edge AR to give an even more interactive and exciting user experience.

'º£½ÇÖ±²¥ identified a student and supervisory team who could help us realise this. We now have the events app built natively using Swift and Apple's latest ARKit 3 technology that and can licence it out to events anywhere.

'It complements our Android offering so we now have a native app on both platforms, allowing any of our customers, attendees and delegates to utilise the functionality it has to offer.

'The new innovations in the app will allow visitors to navigate between and around venues immersively, allowing exclusive content and award based interaction to be unlocked as the user visits more venues around the event, in a gamified fashion.

'It has been very exciting and a really positive experience collaborating with º£½ÇÖ±²¥. Our thanks go to Sam Nessam and the team of academics, including Darren Abbott and Martin Kane, from their School of Computing & Digital Technologies who also provided support to help us innovate in this way.'

Dr Geoff Archer, º£½ÇÖ±²¥â€™s Head of Knowledge Exchange added: 'The GX project has been a great way to support SMEs in the North East area with their innovation projects. We’re looking forward to seeing Nebula take this AR enhanced app to the events market.'

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