Disney Offers Up IP For Healthy Living Projects

Disney is opening up its entire IP catalogue for game developers and tech companies who want to create healthy living projects.

The initiative - the Disney Healthy Living Digital Project - is a collaboration with not-for-profit organisation, Creative England, and is looking to commission a project "aimed at encouraging families to be more actively engaged with their own wellbeing". That means you can submit games, apps, tools, video - basically it just needs to be digital - and can take advantage of smart tech and wearables (so virtual and augmented reality are possibilities as is stuff like fitness monitoring bands). You can use stories and characters from the Disney, Marvel and Star Wars universes to fulfil the brief.

Overall there's £95,000 available - three £5,000 proof of concept grants and one £80,000 product development investment. That £80k would then be repaid through any revenue generated by the project. I'm not sure what would happen to further revenue - I didn't see any mention in the FAQs or application guidelines. They do stipulate that all IP in the developed project will be owned exclusively by the Walt Disney Company.

I probably wouldn't get one of the grants. That's partly because I'm based in Greater London and it's only for companies based elsewhere in England and partly because my idea was a virtual reality game where you play as Ariel the Little Mermaid. You have decided to start taking fish oil supplements and you must learn to navigate tricky moral and ethical dilemmas through arguments with Flounder as you swim about in the sea.

You might fare better.

Deadline for submissions is 20 April and there's a bunch of application information over on Creative England's site.