Dolby Atmos – a visit to Dolby’s new screening room in Soho

Dolby’s screening room in Soho Square, London

Last week I had an opportunity to visit Dolby Labs new London home in Soho Square, the trip was mainly to visit one of our students from one of our audio engineering programmes at Salford University who is on placement there for 12 months. The screening room here is impressive in itself – a small cinema with near-perfect acoustics and a 4K projector, pretty much an ideal listening environment and as part of the visit I got to experience Dolby’s Atmos demos. I’ve been looking forward to this for quite a while…

Atmos is an exciting prospect for many of us involved in audio research as it is the first commercial object based audio system that has potential to go mainstream.

Comment: is blogging or tweeting about research papers worth it?

Just read @melissaterras great article here on her experiences using social media to promote her research papers.

Unsurprisingly the papers she blogged about and tweeted were downloaded more, the only surprise was how much more. I am curious how much of this is because they were available for free download rather than being behind a paywall though. Would similar results have happened had she linked to the usual “you do not subscribe to this journal” message?

It’s another insight into academic publishing which doesn’t make pretty reading for publishing academics.

The paywall adopted by the vast majority of academic journals might as well be designed to prevent people accessing knowledge. But this access problem has no impact on publisher profits. Academics have to publish in these journals because of national research assessment exercises, institutions have to pay for access so that academics can cite the articles in the papers they submit, often to the same journals. Sound like a scam? Feels like it too.

FascinatE project 2nd review

I’ve just returned from an intense week at the FascinatE EU FP7 project review  at Fraunhofer HHI, Berlin, you can find some detail of the project here. This is our second annual review by the European Commission review team, I blogged about the first one at the time. As part of the review we’ve demonstrated a bunch of components from the project, many of which are now integrated after a great deal of development work over the last year and some very long working days and nights over the last couple of months.

This time we’ve been pretty ambitious and ran the review in parallel with a first public demonstration of the system combined with a test shoot at the Arena concert hall in Berlin. The test shoot is

Live football broadcast – OB at Eastlands

After a chance meeting at BVE recently I was invited by Ian Rosam to join Sky’s outside broadcast audio crew to see how they cover live football so found myself at Manchester City vs Blackburn at Eastlands on Saturday afternoon. Really useful visit from a couple of angles for me: one is for the Fascinate Project, the other is my current teaching in digital control in audio. Also always good to develop links with the industry we are sending our graduates out into.

The FascinatE project I’ve talked about once or twice before – we’re developing an end to end ‘future broadcast’ system for live events and as part of this we covered a Premier League game with 180 degree hi resolution video and 3D sound at Stamford Bridge thanks to the good people at Chelsea Football Club and friends at SISLive, the outside broadcaster. Saturday was a bonus as Sky have slightly different methods and equipment compared to SIS and it was another opportunity to get first hand knowledge of how live sports broadcast is done. Also

an Audio Augmented Reality Query

I have thought occasionally about wayfinding applications of surround sound presented over headphones – using a bunch of filters (called Head Related Transfer Functions) to replicate the experience of 3D sound but using only a stereo signal over headphones. As you may know using HRTF you can get very good surround sound – it’s used by games such as Papa Sangre – but can be made more accurate and effective with customised filters for an individual person.

The RNIB see benefit in looking at audio related wayfinding apps for mobile phones with GPS and wanted to know what I could do for them so I started thinking about how sighted people find their way round a strange place.

Then I thought about hardware to make it happen. It would need

University at MediaCityUK teaching week 2

Foyer of University of Salford at MediaCityUK (pic by Heloukee)

I’ve been here 4 weeks now but we’re on week 2 for our students. Before we opened around 1600 students attended inductions for our building from courses covering areas such as TV, radio, journalism, media, audio, video, animation and multimedia. I’ve had a great week or so seeing the rooms I’ve spent the last three and a half years helping plan full of activity. There’s still snagging going on of course – it’s a new build and we lost a little testing time before opening but both staff and students are on a learning curve here so something of a shared adventure taking place.

Most of the facilities are up and running; TV and radio studios are full with

Picture Post: the University @ MediaCityUK

Photos of our new building at MediaCityUK

The mezzanine with open access PCs, information desk and chilled atmosphere

All my previous blog pics from MCUK were taken with whatever phone I had in my pocket – sorry about the quality. So today I took the opportunity to spend an hour wandering round the building with my camera to give our students a taste of what they’re going to get when they arrive.

The foyer - open to the public from 4th October

So, starting on the ground floor….

FascinatE Project Review

FascinatE Project

One of the research projects I’m working on is a large scale EU funded research project called FascinatE: ‘Format-Agnostic SCript-based INterAcTive Experience‘.

The project has been up and running since last February and is developing a complete future end-to-end broadcast system for covering live events. We are capturing 180 degree hi-res panoramic video and stitching it together with clusters of HD cameras so that the whole panorama can be navigated by script based, and possibly free viewpoint control from the viewer. Though is viewer still the right word? I think more of an active participant once you start creating your own scene, and your own narrative through an event. We’ve been talking in terms of ‘lean forward’ and ‘lean back’ approaches so there’s a default set of production for your personal tastes/demographic/preferences in ‘lean back’ mode and options for wider control in ‘lean forward’ mode.

I just got back from the first annual review of the project by the European Commission, all went pretty well regarding the review. The best bit about the review process for me was that all 11 partners put together demos of the work that they have been doing over the last year or so for the reviewers and there’s some great work been done already. Here’s a brief flavour of some of it

Ars Electronica visit

Last week I had the pleasure of visiting the Ars Electronica Centre in Linz, Austria with a view to working with them in our MediaCityUK activity.

Ars Electronica started life as an electronic arts festival and has expanded rapidly since building a dedicated centre with exhibition space, public engagement and research activity. The model used for their research – that of putting together trans-disciplinary teams that can bring unique solutions to problem – is one that is core to research at our new building at MediaCityUK and ahead of our opening in autumn this year it seemed a good time to talk.

Visit to Fraunhofer’s Time Lab

180 degree display in the Time Lab fed by 7 HD projectors

Great visit on Friday to Fraunhofer’s Time Lab at the Heinrich Hertz Institute in Berlin. The installation only opened a week ago and I got to experience it during a research meeting as a break from discussions. The Time Lab is a showcase for next generation video and cinema systems and, in particular, for HHI’s Omnicam (more on that in a mo).

The display in the Time Lab is a very wide screen lit by seven HD projectors, the display covers 180 degrees and is an extremely immersive experience