BOM (Birmingham Open Media) is proud to return as a sponsor for this year’s BDF Conference! We’re excited to continue supporting BDF, whose commitment to supporting the local creative community, aligns with our own mission to empower and engage communities. 

Founded in 2014, BOM is an immersive arts organisation, empowering communities through immersive innovation and learning. We create award-winning experiences in Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality and games with a strong social purpose, driven by our mission to make the immersive sector more inclusive. Our experience covers everything from app and games development, providing high-level immersive consultancy and inclusive learning programmes which aim to give underserved communities the skills to become confident creators.

One of the standout projects we’re especially proud of this year is our mobile game, Mother Nature: EcoDash. Developed by our Immersive Studio team, this endless runner game was co-designed with young people and inspired by themes around climate change.

With community impact and social purpose at the heart of our work, we were excited to work with a group of girls from Powered by CAN. They played a key role in shaping the characters and visual style. This experience was incredibly meaningful as it inspired and empowered the girls to explore career pathways in STEM, game design and other creative fields.

Mother Nature:EcoDash is the first of our Mother Nature experiences to be released and we are currently developing Mother Nature VR which we recently showcased at SXSW in Austin, Texas. More information on Mother Nature can be found here. 

Learning and Inclusion are important to us and we deliver education and outreach to over 1,500 underserved children, young people and adults each year, particularly those who face economic barriers or disabilities. 

Our Adult learning programme is our Immersive Arts Bootcamp where we teach adults to create immersive experiences using Unreal Engine over 12 weeks. This course is free and fully-funded by the WMCA and open to diverse participants, particularly those who live in a government priority place, neurodivergent, ethnic minority backgrounds or with a disability. The goal is to upskill creatives with immersive skills leading to new job opportunities. We’re incredibly proud of this course and the amazing achievements of our alumni, who have gone on to win awards and build careers in the creative industry.

In addition to Bootcamp, we run a schools programme where in the past year we’ve engaged with 10 schools and 1,596 children and young people. Our Powering Up initiative is a three-year project funded programme by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation designed to empower Black children in North Birmingham through creative digital skills and encourage greater diversity in creative industries. Most recently, we also launched a new programme tailored for students with special education needs and disabilities (SEND), delivered in collaboration with All Age Autism, a Landau project.

We’re delighted to be supporting BDF again this year and we can’t wait to attend the conference in June, soak up the atmosphere and connect with the amazing BDF community.

To learn more visit www.bom.org.uk and follow us on LinkedIn and Instagram.