91Èȱ¬

An unofficial iteration planning session for Autumnwatch kicks off Monday. Duncan and Chris B are going to build a clickable wireframe of the end-to-end app which will demonstrate how it's all going to work and be joined up; we'll then iterate through the designs when they become available. Theo and Jo will be sorting the user testing stuff and some of the promo material. Tris meets up with some Vision people to explore some ideas about storytelling on the web, and some possible future projects. Paul, George and I start the week as we mean to go on; with a series of telco's.

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Podcasts and iPlayer have done much to hand control of radio listening over to the audience. Now, instead of having to make an appointment with your radio to hear your favourite programmes, you can catch up with the programme on the iPlayer at a convenient time or, in some cases subscribe to the podcast and listen to it wherever is convenient; for me that used to be the long train ride to and from work, but now I walk to work in our North Lab that has changed.Ìý

Now that we have many radio programmes available when and where you want to listen to it, could we take that control one stage further and provide radio how you like it, remixed and reworked to your personal needs and preferences? I think we could, but it needs a change in the way we think about radio production. That change might also bring about improvements in efficiency in the production of radio, and TV programmes. We already need to make different versions for different time slots and different platforms and podcasts often have to be edited to remove or reduce the length of some of the music for rights reasons. It was this problem which originally lead me to propose a change in the way we make some radio programmes, but my work on the intelligibility of speech in broadcast sound has brought this subject to the fore again. I am trying to get people interested in an object oriented approach to production and get people thinking about what it could mean for our audiences.

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After completing our week long installation at the Anti-Design Festival in London's trendy Shoreditch gallery district, we were all ready to settle in to a much needed period of rest. The project had been a massive success, seeing over 6000 people through the doors of the small Londonewcastle project space on Redchurch Street over the course of the week.Ìý

Following the festival, we received the brilliant news that our interactive installation - 'The Cut Up' had been accepted on to the short list for the NEMarts prize which was to be awarded at the Networked and Electronic Media summit in Barcelona, an event which brings together industry leaders and experts to both exhibit their latest creations and products and to share and discuss ideas about areas and issues surrounding technology at large.Ìý

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NEMarts was introduced to the conference this year to reflect the rapidly expanding area of networked and electronic art, with a whole host of contributors across a large range of disciplines exhibiting their creations in the main hall. In addition to the exhibition of the art works, there was also a program of open discussions which brought together the artists, engineers and academics involved in the event to explore the relationships between technology, art and design and wider issues surrounding open innovation with the aim of inspiring new work and topics for future discussions and collaborations.

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'The Cut Up' Ìýhad to be physically reworked by Dave and Ryszard of our collaborators on the project, Ìýto better fit into the space we were given in the NEM exhibition hall. This new manifestation of the piece consisted of a massive central plywood pillar containing the four displays, with the speakers and furniture being arranged in a circle around the outside. The piece proved to be extremely popular with the delegates at the summit, its sheer plywood face and otherworldly sounds providing a welcome departure from the usual slick and neat conference fare.Ìý

As well as representing 'The Cut Up', we were here as part of a wider 91Èȱ¬ R&D presence, exhibiting some of the project work and prototype ideas currently being worked on at R&D including VSAR, MyMedia, and the software based virtual stedi-cam. R&D was also well represented at the conference itself, Adrian Woolard, Project Lead in our North Lab, Chris Chambers, head of the Media Network Integration Lab and George Wright, head of Prototyping were at NEM chairing and contributing to the panel discussions.

The closing ceremony was wrapped up by an inspiring talk by French artist Thierry Coduys on artist-engineer collaboration using the historical example of the 1967 piece '9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering', a collaboration between Bells Labs and a number of different artists including John Cage and Lucinda Childs, and some of his own work, including his epic infrabass installation in the Grand Palais in Paris for Monumenta in 2008.

Following this, Roger Torrenti, CEO of Sigma Orionis came up to present the award. With what seemed like an outrageously long pause, he proceeded not to announce a single winner, but went on to explain how the award Ìýwas going to be split between 5 of the 17 works submitted for the NEMarts prize.Ìý

First out was our own piece, 'The Cut Up'!

The other winners were then announced one by one:

- THIG, a piece exploring ideas of non-anthopocentric social networking
- MHASHUP a music signature piece looking at congruences between music of different civilisations
- LiveCell, an interactive generative music piece
- ArtLab, a project looking at bridging the digital divides

There was some outrageously stiff competition from the other submitted works to NEM arts, and I don't think any of us were really expecting to take home any prizes. Massive thanks to the whole ADF team, to Rowena Goldman for getting us out there and to the engineers at R&D to helped us, again with advice and loan of equipment. This project has been fantastic, and to finish it off with an international award really is the icing on the cake.

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Chris Pike receives the award on behalf of the Cut-up

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At the beginning of the week, there's a big spreadsheet printed out on the wall, showing the Second Screen user test results.ÌýThe team have a phone conference to work out how the triallists are going to be recruited and managed.

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You may have already heard it on the grapevine (or a certain ) that is coming to the end of its current incarnation. For the full background and the details of the process we're planning to go through, Adrian Woolard has written a post on the 91Èȱ¬ Backstage blog.Ìý As the situation develops we'll be updating the story over there, and where activities are coming into the R&D fold they'll have a new home on this blog, and on our main website.

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In this film covering the second day of the Super Hi-Vison trails we conducted with NHK last month we see the Scotland National Tae Kwon Do Team performing in front of both the ultra high resolution Japanese experimental camera system, and our own immersive 3D capture rig.Ìý We take time to catch up with Oliver Grau who explains the principles behind the technology, and also take a look at how more traditional stereoscopic 3D is being perfected in R&D's studio.

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The 91Èȱ¬ is an active partner in the , an industrial consortium promoting the development of creative media in new digital formats across the EU. NEM is Chaired by Jean-Dominique Menieur (NEM Executive Director) and Vali Lalioti of 91Èȱ¬ R&D (NEM VIce-Chair Liaison).

Last week we played a key role as co-Chair, together with Technicolor, responsible for the overall structure,Ìýformat and activitiesÌýof theÌý , with presentations and demonstrations of many of our collaborative projects, chairing and presenting in sessions, and even participating in the new NEMart competition, bringing together innovative artists and technologies from across Europe.

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A few weeks ago we told you about the trials we ran in TC0 to inaugurate our new production research facility.Ìý We've finally managed to polish off the videos detailing the activities of these events, and present you first of all with a short film outlining the events of the 29th of September, when we hosted the 6 Music Live session of the Charlatans.

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The week starts with another addition to the team, Kat, who is our new development producer. She goes straight into looking at ideas for innovative applications of large volumes of real-time Twitter data and is starting to plan some workshops to gather more ideas over the next few weeks. Paul and Chris N talk about message queues and data storage and Chris continues the Eucalyptus installation and then moves on to . Tony's built a demo using a Wiimote to control the tempo of some overly complicated orchestral music, as if you are a conductor. We agreed it would be better if it had a beat. Right now he's at his desk opposite me silently conducting to himself. Sam's been working on the new P2P-Next metadata spec to cope with transitions from live to on-demand.

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In the next 24hours the code running the comments functions on these pages will be updated for this blog and a few others.Ìý This is the first wave of a change that get's rolled out across 91Èȱ¬ blogs over the next week, so there's an element of "trial" to this (just what we like here at R&D).

The changes you'll notice are around the way the page behaves as you submit a comment- it won't reload for one thing.Ìý The style of the box is getting an update, and there will be more labels and information in the page to make it clearer what's happened.

In the background there is some improved caching which should improve performance and the bandwidth demand should come down a bit.Ìý Eventually this backend development will underpin a new generation of comments platform for us, but for now, we're getting a few key advantages without a massive overhaul.

We hope to have a few films later this week for you to take a look at, but until then, enjoy the new elements of this site.Ìý

An exciting start to the week as we welcome someone new into the team - Joanne, our new senior interaction designer. She'll be sitting with Vicky and Theo and helping out on the user experience and interaction design side of our work. All of the above have had an intense week as our new Second Screen prototype reaches its user testing phase.

George and I spend Monday finishing our interviewing and collating our notes together from the past few days. On Wednesday, Tris, Sean, Chris N and myself sit down and get into some detailed speccing & planning about the Big Data project, which is fruitful. There's much more to do, but we eke out a direction and a few initial tasks and spikes to delve into, around engines and cloud hosting.

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It's full steam ahead on the Springwatch companion prototype this week; user testing has been scheduled next week so the pressure is on. Theo is frantically wrapping up his work and Chris B and Duncan are trying to sort out some possible library clashes. I'm pulling together a plan to get us from user testing to a possible public trial. Sean's heads down finalising the tech post for Zeitgeist and making some final mods to the code after some peer review; you can read the final outcome here.

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