Reality Emulator - Future Opportunity and Market Engagement

The University of Bristol is shortly looking to embark on an a new procurement exercise to develop a cutting edge Reality Emulator. This notice is to advise the suppliers of this future opportunity and the forthcoming market engagement event. For full details, see below.

1. The Opportunity: The University of Bristol is seeking to undertake a competitive procedure for the development and supply of a Reality Emulator. This is an exciting opportunity for the successful Supplier to be part of a highly innovative project which seeks to create an open and accessible facility to enable experience-driven socio-technical research i.e. to allow the creation of increasingly large and complex future scenarios, and to allow many such scenarios to be supported concurrently. The University has recently undertaken tenders via the open procedure for the equipment, however due to a re-evaluation and a subsequent change to University’s own internal constraints, these procurement exercises were discontinued. This new opportunity seeks to engage with the market in a collaborative and innovative way via a different procedure. The Reality Emulator will be a unique physical-virtual environment, which will allow the study of complex socio-technical systems at different scales, in different contexts, and at different stages, (from early-stage technologies through to embedded social systems) addressing fundamental research questions about technical development, social change commercial models, security, ethics, policy and legislation. This will be achieved by creating digital models of physical environments / scientific phenomena, ingesting real world data, and studying the outcomes in the immersive facilities. This new facility will include: 1) state of the art software defined connectivity services both internally and with the city/region established testbeds, including 5/6G. 2) a virtualised datacentre environment, providing compute, data, network, and security services. 3)ultra-high-performance, reconfigurable hardware platforms (e.g. FGPAs and Neuromorphic devices 4) advanced immersive reality facilities (a cave and VR/AR environments) 5) diverse internet facing services for supporting smart infrastructures and ingestion of data. The new tender is intended to be released end of August 2021; this PIN serves to notify the market of this upcoming tender opportunity only and is not a call for competition.