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.

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

Facebook: your pact with the devil

In bed with Facebook, image from Mashable http://on.mash.to/FPT7XZ

I’m as frustrated as everyone else at constantly shifting Facebook privacy settings, and have struggled to keep my posts, and my kids posts private like many others. It’s a difficult place to be at times when you’d like to keep a personal life separate from a professional identity. It’s particularly worrying when dealing with kids’ Facebook accounts, even though these are the ‘digital natives’ we hear so much about there’s very little awareness of future consequences of everything being available for all to see. I even keep an extra account open so I can check on the privacy setting of their accounts – how much do I really want a stranger to see about my kids? How much is

Image via Nik Hewitt (http://nikhewitt.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/facebook-and-you.html)

safe? The apparent default setting of “open to all” every time the feature set changes does not help matters and means that a war of attrition is constantly in progress against creeping privacy invasion. So much for ‘friendly Facebook’ eh?

It gets worse though. It seems that some organisations, including colleges and government agencies in the USA are demanding usernames and passwords for prospective student and employees facebook accounts

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

Audio Flipboard anyone?

Listen: Sign on BBC Building at MediaCityUK

“ I think 2012 will be the year that audio in social really explodes.“

When I first got my hands on an iPad Flipboard was a revelation – previously I dug into Twitter and Facebook chronologically and Flipboard’s magazine layout and easy-to-browse nature made it a much more random and fun process. I’d spot things I hadn’t before but more interestingly, I was reading social media streams like I’d read a newspaper and not at my desk with a computer.

While reading Katie Moffat’s predictions for 2012 I was struck by, “ I think 2012 will be the year that audio in social really explodes.“

I commented on the post that, “ it really needs a platform that will manage audio well. If we had something that would do to podcasts and AudioBoo what FlipBoard does for text you’d have yourself a custom radio magazine show, it’d be awesome! I’d listen every morning on the daily commute. “

The post made me think, there must be a way of aggregating audio content, esp social content in a similar vein to FlipBoard. I’d be interested in knowing if anyone has done this effectively yet BECAUSE I WANT IT! And if it’s not being done, looking further into developing ideas around it. Would make an interesting project for some of our bright students perhaps. Shuffler.fm are doing it for music but I haven’t yet found an equivalent for spoken word….

BVE2012 Looking good, who’s going? Time to register…

One seminar for me to catch is “Sound of the Games”, Dennis Baxter, Sound Designer for 2012 London Olympics. Interesting if you caught him on radio 4, The Sound Of Sport you’ll know what I mean. Also Immersive audio systems explored – Sound for 3D with Pieter Schillbeeckx, Soundfield and a friend and neighbour of mine at MediaCityUK, Chris Pike from BBC R & D.

http://www.bvexpo.com/

Games People Play: a post from the ETC

The Last Message - A Kinect platform-game that tells a story of the journey of a waveform. The player controls the the amplitude and frequency of the waveform using both arms, and must guide it to the broadcasting tower — with Brian Lee, Ruijie Liu, Shibli Mansuri and Scott Chen. From the Fall 2011 BVW Show

As promised, this post comes from Pittsburgh where I’m working for a week as a guest of Carnegie Mellon University’s Entertainment Technology Center (ETC).

The inimitable Don Marinelli, Executive Producer of the ETC

The ETC was created by the inimitable Don Marinelli and the late Randy Pausch combining skills in drama and computer science to produce game designers and “entertainment technologists”. It is a unique place that I have written about before. Students here study on a largely project based masters programme that aims to produce graduates that thrive on cross disciplinary team based project work. 

I’ve been invited here to do some workshops on 3D audio and to inspire students to incorporate some of the work we do at the Acoustics Research Centre at Salford into their projects and

Social Media and learning: why?

Twitter: Come to the dark side (pic Dot D)

I’ve just been reading through some of our BSc Professional Sound and Video Technology student blogs and having read @JustPressPlay_‘s post A few thoughts.. « JDTWerk I started commenting on it and the comment got long enough for a new post on here. So here it is, gets me back on track anyway as I’ve been getting busy again and the blogging is the first thing to drop off the to do list.

Firstly it’s a nice post and resonates with me as I didn’t ‘get’ Twitter for a long time. Until it starts being useful to you it’s just so much noise and there’s plenty of mainstream media belittling the platform as pointless. I have a lot of sympathy for the students who just don’t want to engage with it. It doesn’t necessarily seem core to what they feel they should be learning. It’s worth persisting though.

In the end I was forced onto the platform by my students who were

#12hrfashion: Salford & Melbourne Online Fashion Collaboration

Logo from the Salford & RMIT Fashion Facebook page

As I type this around 60 students at University of Salford and about the same number at RMIT in Melbourne, Australia are coming to the end of a 12 hour fashion design-and-make collaboration and putting the finishing touches to their garments. The collaboration came out of discussion at Salford’s Media, Digital Technology & the Creative Economy  Steering Group and was the brainchild of Bashir Aswat (Fashion, Art & Design School) and Marianne Patera (Computing, Science & Engineering) who drove the whole project from the start.

The fashion groups in Salford and Melbourne both sent sealed bags of materials to each other in advance of

Bashir at #12hrfashion

the event, students at the receiving end had no idea what they were being sent ahead of the start of the 12 hour marathon. All student groups were linked to matching groups at the other side of the world by social networks and mobile devices. Twitter, Facebook, Skype, Bambuser, Ustream have all been used so that students could communicate right through the process. At each end a big screen displayed a live video overview of activity at the other side of the world.

I was there for the first couple of hours at Salford and have been following online since then – the event has been amazing! The buzz in the room as preparations were made for the 9pm start was really infectious, excited students and staff distributing mystery parcels sent from Melbourne – many with friendly messages on from their counterparts in Australia.

@samrecordsmusic is carrying out an MSc project on user generated content and motivation, he’s covering this as a case study and was helping out with some of the tech on the night.

I was