Through the Looking Glass: return to the ETC

Over the last couple of years I have written a little about my previous visits to the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University here and here, a few things have changed since then so this visit was an interesting one in a number of ways. First of all Don Marinelli has now retired. As Don was one of the two founders of the ETC this leaves something of a hole in the place: Don is something of a superstar – inspirational speaker, larger than life character and a truly gifted teacher with a tight grasp on how learning works. A good friend too. Nevertheless, the ETC is bigger than any one man and Don and Randy Pausch provided enough momentum that I suspect their ongoing project is pretty much unstoppable now.

Also, last semester we had the pleasure of hosting one of the ETC’s project teams here at MediaCityUK, (I’ll document that in another post soon – complications around a parallel project meant that I’ve been obliged to keep quite about it till now). This was my first return visit since hosting the project at MediaCityUK and I was here to do more workshops on 3D audio and how ETC projects could use it in game development. The brilliant Dave Purta, the ETC tech support, made sure all the hardware was set up for me and ready to roll so I arrived with a couple of laptops on the audio evangelist tour pt II.

A nice welcome when I arrived

Last year I showed

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

A very good cause indeed

http://www.justgiving.com/Martin-Spooner

Last year a friend of mine from Coniston Sailing Club, Grant Spooner, had a heart attack in Coniston and his life was saved as a result of the NW Air Ambulance service arriving promptly and getting Grant to hospital in Blackpool within 20 mins. NWAA cover 5500 square miles and a population of around 8 million people. They are called out between 5 and 10 times daily and rely almost entirely on voluntary contributions.

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….