BDFI’s Reality Emulator, the flagship facility at The Sheds, has reached an important milestone with the completion of its immersive cave. 

The immersive cave is a 360-degree LED screen, allowing up to eight users to ‘immerse’ themselves in a visualisation of their digital model. This could be a city, a factory, an engine, a molecule, or a system such as a telecommunication network or a health system. 

The Reality Emulator is a sector agnostic digital twin facility which will enable sociotechnical collaboration across disciplines and sectors. There are two parts to it: the immersive cave for visualisations, and the data centre, which houses the compute, data, network, immersive and integration platforms. 

In linking to the data centre, the cave will allow teams to develop, test and interact with visualisations of their AI-driven digital twin models, harnessing real time and historic data at scale, generating potential future scenarios.   

You can watch a timelapse film of how the immersive cave build took place here: 

Dr Jenny Knapp, Operations Director at BDFI said: “The completion of the immersive cave is a really significant step in delivering the full potential of our Reality Emulator.  

“This facility will enable emulation of future scenarios empowering real-time co-design and co-production of new digital technologies. We plan for it to be fully operational in January 2025. 

“We are actively looking for collaborators who are interested in what the Reality Emulator can offer them. We are particularly interested in pilot projects, those who have digital twins or models they would like to try out. Please get in touch with us to discuss.”