Flix creates the Motor Neurone Disease Association an interactive virtual reality tour of a laboratory to demonstrate the impact that gifts in Wills have on funding research into motor neurone disease. The 360-degree tour gives users a fully immersive experience as it follows a donated skin sample from arrival at the lab to drug screening for potential new treatments. The Sheffield Institute of Translational Neuroscience (SITraN), one of the world’s leading centres for research into MND and home to seven MND Association funded research projects.

If you’d like to learn more about the Motor Neurone Disease Association and their tour, please click HERE.

Flix REELS was officially launched at an event in Clapham Common, London earlier in the year. Since that event the team has worked with several charities and public sector organisations to develop pilot and first stage REELS. REELS (Reality Enhanced Experiential Learning Scenarios) are designed to give the best available sensory experience, through 360 vision and sound, re-creating emotional real-life experiences, previously impossible in traditional training. If a picture is worth a thousand words, what is a REEL Scenario worth?

If you’d like to know more about REELS, please check out HERE.

It is well known that homeless people do not access healthcare in the same way as the general population and the same goes for their access to palliative care. So during Homeless awareness week we gave Royal Trinity Hospice staff an immersive Virtual Reality experience to gain a small insight into what it’s like to be homeless. Please watch the video below to hear what they had to say!

If you’d like to know more about how to access our range of VR Experiences, please check out HERE

In February 2018 Flix was invited by Sandy Lambert to the Motor Neurone Disease Association South Essex AGM to deliver Virtual Reality experiences to their members.  Being the second MND event the Association had invited us to we asked whether it would be ok if we captured some of the wonderful responses and here they are!

If you’d like to know more about how to access our range of VR Experiences, please check out HERE.

Aired in March 2017, as part of the final edition of BBC 1 Inside Out for the season, this short film features the work Flix Films is undertaking in partnership with Royal Trinity Hospice and care facilities to bring VR Experiences to people who find themselves isolated or restricted in interacting with the world as a result of their health or age.

In 2016 our film work led us to a partnership with the Motor Neurone Disease Association here in the UK. During this time we came to really understand the limitations and isolation that can result from serious health conditions, and wondered what could be done to try and help. Through MNDA we were fortunate enough to meet Sarah Ezekiel, Sarah has lived with MND for over 16 years and has a form of MND that means she has minimal body movement. She communicates via ‘Tobii Eye Gaze’ technology and has used her illness to inspire and pioneer technology benefitting others with limited movement. We asked Sarah if there were any experiences she wished she’d had – her reply was ‘I always wanted to swim with dolphins’. It was a light-bulb moment! Through connections we had in the VR entertainment industry, we were able to organise a demonstration for Sarah. Our hope was to give her an experience as close to reality as possible, using real life filmed content. We weren’t sure how her physical limitations would affect her experience, or how she would feel.

If you’d like to learn more about the Motor Neurone Disease Association please click HERE.

It was immediately clear to us that VR could have life changing impacts on people like Sarah, who face isolation and limitations in experiencing things we might otherwise take for granted. Understanding that most VR development is aimed at the entertainment and gaming market, we decided to try and explore how VR might be developed specifically to help people. Our first step was to sift through ‘000s hours of existing material to put together playlists of the very best experiential VR footage, to start to understand what works. Our playlists are available for everyone to benefit from HERE. Our next step is to research how to develop the best VR content to benefit people’s health and wellbeing – to understand how all the pieces need to come together, combining filming techniques, sound scape, and content. And we’re putting our money where our hearts are – investing in new technology that will allow us to capture live events and training experiences, and deliver live streaming, so that we can produce the very best content as we learn.

What’s your thoughts?