Olivier's week began on Saturday, when he headed off to the State of The Browser event. He learnt a lot about upcoming HTML5 features - including some really nifty demoes of speech recognition, audio, video, 3D acceleration, and form accessibility and validation. He's particularly excited to see how browsers are now competing: they can't compete on features when they all try to adhere to standards, but they can compete on how early they support future standards (things that are making it into HTML5 or other APIs, but not standard yet), how often they release (hence a version number race which sees Mozilla planning to accelerate Firefox versions - going from 4.0 through 7.0 in 2011 alone) and on UI - or lack thereof.
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The weekend of 11th March 2011 was a busy one for R&D. In addition to the South Lab setting up shop at the Science fair at London Docklands, a group from the R&D North Lab flanked by Ian, Bruce and Yameen from ´óÏó´«Ã½ TV Platforms went up to the Centre for Life in Newcastle Upon Tyne to attend the annual , a weekend festival of inventors, hackers and tinkerers.Ìý
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Recently there's been a lot of discussion in the technology scene
about open-data and ways of working with large datasets. A recent high
profile story was the UK government's project, which aims
to make reams of public data accessible on-line in electronic
form. The opening up of this data suggests many .
In this article we look at the emerging "Data Marketplace" providers, and build a small example application for querying ´óÏó´«Ã½ Programmes data on top of Kasabi's new platform
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This week was our bi-annual review by the management; much talk of KPIs and deliverables and slide-wrangling. But I don't imagine that you want to hear about that.
We pitched a few second screen ideas to the ´óÏó´«Ã½'s head of UX and agreed the one we're going to follow up together where we'll develop some of our ideas from Autumnwatch to cover another area of ´óÏó´«Ã½ programming. Kat's grabbed some rambling discussions by the scruff of the neck and is now organising and documenting some work on the ´óÏó´«Ã½'s strategy for user-owned data. User-generated content has really come of age: now it has ethical, technical and business considerations that need straightening out before it can be used to its full potential. Theo and Kat attended a research debrief on narratives and ´óÏó´«Ã½ programmes - - possibly obvious but definitely useful evidence.
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is an online ´óÏó´«Ã½ R&D experiment, alongside the and the to develop new ways of cataloguing and searching the ´óÏó´«Ã½ Archive. The experiment involves listening to ´óÏó´«Ã½ TV Theme tunes from the Wombles to Spooks and documenting the theme tune mood and what type of programme this theme tune could be used with.
So how does this help with searching the ´óÏó´«Ã½ archives?
Sam and Mark set up the Musical Moods experiment on the British Science Association stand at the Big bang Science Fair last week at ExCel London.
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At in London's docklands last week schools and companies from across the world of Science Technology Engineering and Maths (aka STEM) came together for the , the culmination of educational science and technology competitions from across the UK.Ìý The ´óÏó´«Ã½ were there in strength, with Bang Goes the Theory, Wallace and Gromit's World of Invention, 21CC, Class Clips, Bitesize, and this year ´óÏó´«Ã½ R&D went along too.
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The team set up demonstrations for Big bang last Wednesday
The show tours the country- last year it was in Manchester.Ìý This year for the first time we sent a team from R&D taking three demos, plus an additional team based on the stand (more details on that tomorrow).Ìý We also had a team at in Newcastle this weekend, so it's been a busy few days!
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One of the projects we're working on in the R&D Prototyping team is , a technology that allows hybrid radios to deliver relevant interactive content while you listen to the radio over FM or DAB. Representatives from UK commercial radio James Cridland and Nick Piggott described the benefits of a technology such as this on the Radio Labs blog.
We've been working recently on RadioVIS, an application that uses RadioDNS to deliver over IP images and text messages corresponding to the radio broadcast.
Chris Needham previously posted about our initial experiments and a Python client that allows you to see the content without having the requisite radio device.
We're now ready to test a prototype and get your feedback.
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One year and one month into our Weeknotes "experiment", what has the prototyping team been up to this week?
A number of are in early or late stages of their life at the moment. Kat spent some time demoing RadioVIS in Centre House, and organising final touches to the RadioVIS trial. Meanwhile, Sean and Chris L. were working on our proposals for the RadioTAG spec - generating sequence diagrams for our proposed protocol, documentation and considering various scenarios to convince ourselves that it is secure and fit-for-purpose.
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It's my first time writing the team's weeknotes. Hello!
Monday's stand-up kicked off another productive week on Watch Later. Tris and Theo continued to work on user stories for Watch Later, distilling numerous potential use cases down to five representative journeys, and applying Ideo's to the process, to see if it was a useful addition to how we work. Frameworks can be sometimes be restrictive, but they are also useful in letting us see what we've missed.
Monday was Mark's last day in the team, as he goes off to Centre House in West London to continue his industrial traineeship in another R&D team. Akua baked another of her amazing cakes to send him off, and we were sad to see him go. The cake helped us get through it though.
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A few months ago ´óÏó´«Ã½ Childrens 'Blue Peter' programme asked us to help them to capture a dry-slope skiing event at , north of Manchester, on the 15th February 2011. This was a high jump Guinness World Record attempt on a quarter pipe.Ìý We're partners in the i3DLive project and we quickly realised that this would provide the ideal tools for the program and for the people to get the measurements they needed.Ìý ´óÏó´«Ã½ R&D took along 16 High Definition cameras to capture the jumps of nine different athletes, and captured it using our Distributed Capture and Processing System.Ìý After the on location recording, free-viewpoint video render techniques were then used to visualise the skiers jumps, and to observe their performance from every imaginable angle.
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Figure 1. The quarter pipe at Ski Rossendale
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On Friday 25th February Students from the in London presented their final concepts on media services for homes of the future to an audience of ´óÏó´«Ã½ R&D staff, tutors and students.
Since the beginning of February small groups of students from the departments of Innovation Design Engineering, Communication Art & Design and History of Design have been working on one of the following three questions under the guidance of ´óÏó´«Ã½ R&D staff:
- How can we re-imagine the inter-generational home through media extension into connected environments?
- How can diverse media streams encourage dialogue and enable shared experiences?
- Can assistive technologies for disabled viewers be delivered in a way that complements and enhances the viewing experience of others in a shared space?Ìý
Prior to the presentations, work continues apace in the students' workshop
The ideas the students presented were as varied as they were impressive.
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| 09:50 UK time, Monday, 28 March 2011
