New Europe Minister sees Virtual Teesside

The new Minister for Europe, Dr Denis MacShane, will complete a tour of the North East by visiting the University of Teesside's showpiece Virtual Reality Centre this week.

The Ministerial visit coincides with the University's annual graduation ceremony and the 10th anniversary of Teesside being given University-status. Over the last decade, the Middlesbrough-based University has received £20m of EU funding towards its £60m campus transformation. Of this, the VR Centre has received over £4m from Europe.

Dr MacShane will unveil a plaque on the ground floor celebrating the Virtual Reality Centre's recognition by ONE NorthEast as a European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) Centre of Excellence and the decision to designate the VR Centre as a Higher Education Innovation Fund (HEIF) Real Time Interaction Centre.

The Minister will then congratulate the VR Centre on winning its first £1m commercial contract, in keeping with the European-backed drive to encourage technology transfer of the University expertise to support local companies. The contract being celebrated involves creating a virtual Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) for Darlington-based offshore and subsea specialists, CTC, which will help to train operators in laying and retrieving underwater telecommunications cables.

Finally, the Minister will see demonstrations of the VR Centre's work inside its giant Hemispherium, including a virtual walk-through of the planned Middlehaven docklands regeneration project and learn of plans to create an even bigger virtual reality facility as part of Middlesbrough's DigitalCity project on the Middlehaven site.

Janice Webster, chief executive of Virtual Reality Centre at Teesside Ltd., said: "It is great that the Minister can help us to celebrate being recognised as a Centre of Excellence. This is real recognition of our contribution in helping small and medium-sized enterprises to benefit from the expertise in virtual reality applications available here at the University of Teesside.

"European support throughout the five years existence of the VR Centre at Teeside has been invaluable. And I have just learnt that we have been chosen as the only UK university to join a new EU-funded consortium of universities using VR to support the design industry called Information Technologies for European Advancement," she said.

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