Prototyping team
The CoSTAR National Lab prototyping team is a small multidisciplinary team of researchers, producers, creative technologists, designers and developers from across the CoSTAR National Lab’s core partners: the National Film and Television School, University of Surrey, Abertay University and Royal Holloway, University of London.
Led by Miles Bernie, Head of Applied Research for CoSTAR National Lab, this team typically works on short, strategic projects that connect cutting-edge research with practical and high-impact industry use cases. They use an Agile sprint-based innovation methodology: ideate, build, test, review, course correct. Repeat!
The team aims to tackle between 4-8 strategic prototyping projects per year, with each project usually lasting 12 weeks.
When a project is completed, the National Lab shares the results for the benefit of the wider industry, including via our own platforms (such as Substack posts and our newsletter), presenting at industry events, running open access workshops and hack events and Open Sourcing our work and knowledge where applicable.
You can find out more about the previous projects this team has worked on here:
- Exploring the promise of dynamic Gaussian Splat technology for object and scene capture within a production pipeline.
- Realtime Conjuring for Live Performance: the role that audiovisual Generative AI can play in enhancing human creativity in an ethical way using converged media production. We expanded this work around generative real-time production through enhancing our existing toolkit with Agentic AI workflows, simplifying complex studio infrastructure for live production across live formats, virtual production, and improvised performance.
Gaussian Splats & Frosting techniques to support character animation along with inclusive markerless motion capture research
- Human centred Generative AI video production workflows: Our applied research explored how far generative AI video can be taken using open source tools. We focused on training digital likenesses, driving motion of AI characters from live actor performances and dressing characters using AI supported costume design techniques. Find out more in this BTS explainer:
- Explored the potential opportunities and challenges around “AI as a Service,” investigating the architecture and systems needed to enable a licensing platform with C2PA standards and watermarking of LoRA- based generative assets for controllable, transparent, and rights-preserving mechanisms for human–AI creative collaboration
- Audience Interaction tools utilizing computer vision and LiDAR technologies to enable grass roots venues, creatives, and audiences to connect and co-create in novel ways
For the first half of 2026 we will be exploring projects that contribute to the development of AI-enhanced Media Production for Screen, Realtime & Live Performance. We have three main areas of focus for prototyping:
- Production tooling and workflows - the role of AI in their development for screen, realtime and live performance
- Ethical, legal, creative, human-centred uses of Generative AI
- AI enhancement of immersive experiences using a private 5G network with compute resources at the edge of the network to support low-latency and high bandwidth applications
- Democratised AI enhanced worldbuilding for immersive environments.
We are also always interested to hear of other significant and sector-wide challenges which companies are facing in developing converged media production tools, software, hardware, content and experiences.
If you are interested in collaborating with us on a future prototyping project, please contact us at costar.prototyping@rhul.ac.uk.
