‘The future of television?’ FascinatE: The Final Demonstration

This week has seen the final demonstration of research developed over three and a half years of  the FascinatE EU FP7 research project. The project has developed a complete end-to-end future broadcast system which combines ultra high definition panoramic video, 3D ambisonic and object based audio, new methods for delivery of interactive AV content and new interfaces and methods to interact with the AV media at the user end. It’s been my pleasure to lead University of Salford’s part of the project and this week, to host the final demonstration of the project.

We hosted the final demonstration event at our MediaCityUK building – it’s one of the few places that could actually support what we were trying to do, the infrastructure of the building was actually designed for this kind of thing but we pushed it pretty hard this week. FascinatE partners worked through

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

Why I tweet and other stories

A recent post from Daniel Teller rang a bell as I’d been thinking about how, and why I use various social media networks over the last months. I had noticed the fact that some people use it simply to amass followers and so appear more popular and ‘cooler’ that their friends. I have kids and the glee with which they boast about number of ‘likes’ on a post and how many friends they have is hilarious at times. I had rather hoped that it was a kid thing rather than an activity for grown ups

Beyond being depressed by people’s childlike motivation though I was also struck by how much Daniel’s twitter habits, and apparently Facebook habits, differ from my own. The premise of his post is that the essential difference between the platforms is time; Twitter is now and a message from an hour ago is stale and worthless. At one point I started feeling a little hectored, “Twitter is a messaging protocol – not a content store”, “A tweet from yesterday is practically worthless”. Yes it’s not a content store, that’s absolutely true and it’s based on messaging BUT

Down the Rabbit Hole: the ETC at Carnegie Mellon University

On arriving at the Entertainment Technology Centre at Carnegie Mellon University I was taken straight up to the 5th floor to renew my acquaintance with Don Marinelli, the Executive Producer of the ETC whom I first met last year when he visited us at Salford. The lift doors opened and I was confronted by Robbie the Robot standing in front of me, guarding the flight deck of the starship enterprise.

Robbie the robot guarding the flight deck

Ha! The flight deck is complete with

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.

Well connected coffee?

Sandpit for ideas:

The Egg: Cafe/Foyer at University of Salford, MediaCityUK

The foyer of our building at MediaCityUK is big. It’s double height and has a cafe which will serve hot drinks, tea, coffee (gotta be GOOD coffee, I’m fussy), paninis, sandwiches etc.

The floor is tiled and if you look under a tile it has 4o Gb/s bandwidth connectivity to a bunch of media servers and to the rest of the building. Oh and big bandwidth out to anywhere else if you want.

MediaCityUK and University of Salford

It’s been a very busy couple of months. MediaCityUK has been eating up loads of my time, all very exciting stuff which is good but it’s left precious little time for blogging which is not so good.

Now that the new university building is on track we’ve been concentrating energies on what happens when we move in there.