Roo Reynolds

I sort of miss the pigeons

2009-07-09T22:35:52Z

Visiting Trafalgar Square still brings back childhood memories of feeding the birds. Fifty pence (I think) for a spray-can-lid full of seed, rather than the more traditional tuppence a bag.

Filthy winged rats they may be, but I can’t help feeling sorry for the children who don’t get to experience that terrifying thrill of finding themselves surrounded by a sea of pigeons.

Recent reading

2009-07-04T15:02:02Z

May

31 Songs, Nick Hornby - meh
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Díaz - hmm
The Robots of Dawn, Isaac Asimov - gah
Have I Got Views For You, Boris Johnson - yawn
Moondust, Andrew Smith - yay

June

To Your Scattered Bodies Go, Philip José Farmer - passable sci-fi. Apparently it’s the first in the ‘Riverworld’ series, but I don’t think I’ll be bothering to find the rest. Hermann Göring is the one-dimensional bad guy? That’s pretty lazy.
The White Tiger, Aravind Adiga - this is brilliant. Man Booker Prize winner, 2008. It’s everything ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ should have been.
The Corner, David Simon and Ed Burns - it’s like The Wire in condensed, dead-tree form. Brilliant.
Arcadia, Tom Stoppard - watched this play recently and enjoyed it so much I immediately wanted to buy a copy. Choice quotes: “It’s the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew was wrong” and “We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind”
Microserfs, Douglas Coupland - I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve read this. Every time I do, I get a little bit more annoyed about the writing (caricatures of geeks, clunky ethnography, twee unsubtle affected nonsense throughout) but I do cry a little bit harder at page 369.
Labyrinth, Kate Mosse - I don’t really know where to start here. I’ve been describing it as “Dan Brown for girls” and honestly, it’s dreadful. Often whole pages go by before you’ll see an adverb or an adjective while similes and metaphors appear to be rationed at about one per chapter. It’s relentless in telling you something has happened, but the language is so dry and empty that it doesn’t ever make you care. It’s a bit like running across the country with only a bag of Weetabix to keep you going, and no milk; plenty of things will happen, but you won’t enjoy any them.

Guardian Activate 09

2009-07-02T07:53:37Z

I went to Activate 09 today.

“an exclusive one-day summit providing a unique gathering for leaders working across all sectors to share, debate and create strategies for answering some of the world’s biggest questions.”

I was there for most of the day today, though I sadly had to miss a chunk of the afternoon. Here’s a taste of what I saw:

Werner Vogels, CTO, Amazon talked about Amazon Web Services:

Last century, all sorts of companies had to invest in generating their own electricity just to be able do business. Quickly re-fitted to take advantage of electricity as a utility when it become available.
The same is now becoming true for computation. Moving from capital expenditure to variable cost model.
Cloud computing: reduces risk, reduces startup time for new ideas, lets you pay for what you use.
[sales pitch for aws.amazon.com]

Clare Lockhart, co-founder and CEO, Institute for State Effectiveness, co-author with Ashraf Ghani of book ‘Fixing Failed States’, talked about government:

Re-rebuilding Afghanistan: the UN has no manual for building a government, and the World Bank has no manual for building an economy
An army and police force, paid for by tax, paid by a population who has security and justice, which requires… (it’s a circle)
Problems with Afghanistan: no money went to police (because it wasn’t ‘poverty-reducing’), railways (because the country was ‘too poor’) or higher education.
Many failed states are offline and off the grid. many won’t have electricity for > 50% of their population for 10 years
Citizen centered design. Citizens are interested in using the net for market pricing and the transparency of putting budgets online

Arianna Huffington, editor-in-chief, The Huffington Post talked about business and politics.

Raw data can’t be viral. You have to translate it into something that people will share, that will ‘catch fire’.
Were it not for the internet, ‘Obama would not be president’.
Mainstream media suffers from attention deficit disorder. New media suffers from obsessive compulsive disorder.
You consume old media sitting on your couch. You consume new media galloping on a horse.
The cost of launching a new business is now so low that sometimes it’s indistinguishable from starting a new hobby
The next interesting business to watch will be one which… ‘connects in order to disconnect in a hyper-connected society’ (e.g unplug and recharge, remember the value of sleep..)

Nick Bostrom, director, Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute and founder of the world transhumanist foundation, talked about post-humanity and existential events. i.e. being wiped out by extinction or being left behind by the singularity.

Some options for humanity: extinction, plateau of development, recurrent development and collapse, or advancement to post-humanity
Most significant dents in human population have been caused by ‘bad germs or bad men’ all the biggest risks are anthopgenic (i.e. caused by humans) rather than natural
99.99% of all species that ever lived are now extinct
The Toba eruption 75,000 years ago may have reduced the population to ~500 reproducing human females
A ‘rather arbitrary definition’ of post-humanity: population reaches > 1 trillion, life expectancy becomes > 500 years, near-total control over sensory input for majority of people most of the time, psychological suffering becomes rare, … or something comparably profound
Singularity: an artificial intelligence explosion which leaves mankind behind. Proposed by John Von Neuman in 1958, developed by IJ Good in 1965 and subsequently by Ray Kertviel et al

Ed Parson, Geospatial Technologist (’in-house geographer’ at Google) talked about mapping.

Ambient location finding, “the choice to know where we are”.
Our children will probably never know what it’s like to be lost. They will take this for granted. It’s no longer a big deal to know where you are.

Jon Udell, evangelist at Microsoft talked about an aggregation tool he’s been building at http://elmcity.cloudapp.net/ which shares local communiy events from eventful, upcoming etc, with links back to source.

Tom Steinberg, founder and director of mySociety threw away his talk about MPs expenses last night, and instead talked about new media vs old media: “this new media revolution is not the reolvution you’re looking for”

Joke: do you know the difference between the fall of the berlin wall and the twitter revolution in iran? The wall fell.
Amazon didn’t change the publishing industry by writing in industry journals about how the publishing industry could be better. It just starting doing things better.
What could change politics and society? 1 - the next generation of public servants could refuse to comply with current norms and conventions. 2 - or, radical change in computing which makes it harder to keep secrets. 3 - some sort of law that smuggles new ways of distributing and allocating power
Highly usable and simple credit card forms. (how did I buy that book? that was so easy! More people donating to obama because it was easy)

William Perrin, founder, Talk About Local talked about local campaigning using simple (and ‘unfashionable’) publishing tools

kingscrossenvironment.com gets 300 unique visitors per week, but considering it’s intended readership is one small part of london, it has the proportion as a national audience of 1M+. i.e. getting the same audience proportion as Newsnight in his community/ward.
Perfectly normal people publishing effectively using unfashionable technologies, which percolate out into wider society. More examples: Sheffield Forum, parwich.org, Digbeth is Good, Pits ‘n Pots.
Funding from C4 to train and support local community networks

Thomas Gensemer, managing partner and founder, Blue State Digital talked about how his agency ran Obama’s digital campaign:

How do you know you were effective? Because 80% of donations were raised by the online campaign
simplicity of giving, simplicity of volunteering
Blue State Digital previously worked on Ken Livingston’s mayoral election, and have worked with various trade unions, but contrary to some press reports, isn’t currently under contract for Labour
Ask yourself: if you had 100 of your supporters in the room, what would you ask them to do for you today? If you can’t answer that, forget about twitter, facebook etc
faking it is much worse than not doing it. Ted Kennedy isn’t on Twitter but it doesn’t mean he’s absent from online spaces. He participates in ways that are authentic and comfortable for him

Adam Afriyie, shadow minister for science and innovation on the role of technology in democracy, [and was the only speaker to read from a prepared speech]

internet empowers citizens, raises expectations and reveals secrets
it’s not about whether you’re from the left or right, it’s about whether you ‘get it’ or you don’t
we need to meet expectations of transparency and connectedness without compromising privacy and security
conservative party has more friends on Facebook than labour and lib dems combined [useful metric?]
social media won’t clean up politics on its own.

Tom Watson, former minister for transformation

only 60% of government statistics are published [I'm not sure if this is a fact, an estimate or a joke]
civil servants who want to be on Facebook, Twitter etc at work should be able to be. It’s useful, and it shouldn’t be up to an IT or HR manager.
it is ‘totally unacceptable’ for the Ordnance Survey not to provide maps suitable for the digital economy
agrees with Adam Arfiyie that adoption and acceptance is a ‘generational issue’

Matt Webb, CEO, Schulze and Webb, as part of a panel, talked about design of digital and physical objects. [I always find Matt to be consistently quotable]

when my phone rings, it’s like a baby crying. I want my technology to be gossiping with me. I don’t want my washing machine to be a shitty flat-mate
we need to think about inviting products into out lives like inviting friends into our lives. Maybe our digital cameras are nosey. Maybe I have an abusive relationship with my email.
our consumption is out of proportion to our creation. This can start with putting on plays for friends and family, and knowing when our friends are around us so we can talk to them. I try to reinforce relationships with friends rather than meet stranger.

Charlie Leadbeater, founder, Participle / author, We Think / fellow, Nesta talked about African education and ‘learning from extremes

we’ll learn more about the future of education not by going to where schools are, but where they aren’t
the biggest challenges will be in developing world cities. Cities with > 1m people, 86 in 1950, 550 in 2015
developing world says that Education (+ Technology) = Hope

Sugata Mitra, professor of educational technology, ECLS, Newcastle University talked about his hole in the wall experiments

children don’t need to be taught how to use it, or even the language: “you gave us a machine that worked in English, so we taught ourselves English”
clustering around a shared computer proves more effective than having a laptop each. Discussion and sharing key to learning. ’self organised mediation environments’
“I’ve put some interesting information which is in English and very hard in the computer. Will you look at it?” 2 months later, they’d looked at it every day, and claimed to have “understood nothing”, but when pressed admitted “apart from the fact that improper replication of the DNA molecule causes genetic disease, we haven’t learnt anything”
children’s understanding of their own learning is different from our understanding of their learning

John Van Oudenaren, Director, World Digital Library Initiative, The Library of Congress talked about the World Digital Library though I failed to take more notes than that. The site looks interesting though.

Dr. R.K. Pachauri, chairman, IPCC & director general, TERI talked about the scary reality and significant risks of climate change. [and it turns out that it's worse than we thought, thanks to James for the link]

internet is estimated to represent 5% of world’s total electricity consumption (more than half of which comes from computers). ICT sector contributes 2.5% of greenhouse gases
energy efficiency and changes in users’ behaviour can reduce these numbers significantly
but ICT can have positive impact: remote sensing, information dissemination, …
Ghandi: speed is irrelevant if you’re going in the wrong direction

Bradley Horowitz, vice president of products, Google talked about

Google Apps is ‘NSA’ (Google-speak for ‘not search or ads’)
There is no master plan for the internet. It’s made up of billions of contributions. It’s a gestalt. It’s more like an ant colony than anything else
Ideas (or ‘memes’) are being selected for in natural selection. Great number of web 2.0 startups have not survived [see Meg's excellent post which illustrates this]
To double your success rate, double your failure rate” - Thomas Watson (IBM founder)
The importance of killing projects (the time wasn’t right for Google Lively) and protecting them (Wave team was ‘given free reign to develop a platypus’ outside the normal development constraints)

One of the interesting features of the day was having Twitter on-screen on the stage at various points during the day. Regular readers will know that I’ve long been fascinated by backchannels and how they’re used at live events. The tool the Guardian were using today (developed in-house?) and the way they were using it is probably the most mature and best example of using Twitter at a conference I’ve seen to date, for three reasons.

Firstly, it wasn’t using a totally automatic feed; it allowed for local moderation, i.e. the stream was curated, with spam, off-topic and overly negative or offensive content all weeded out. The aim was to publish everything that enhanced the conversation. Meg Pickard explained the approach: “Curation for public view applies a filter which helps signal v noise” because “open access publishing to public screen is a red rag to plenty of bull“.

Secondly, several Guardian staff were present in the room and on Twitter, informally ‘hosting’ the Twitter discussion by answering questions, re-tweeting key points and generally being interesting and interested participants.

Thirdly, the Twitter stream was not shown on-stage continuously, and was only switched to when the main screen wasn’t in use with another presentation. This worked very well, with the gaps between sessions and the during questions became the obvious and appropriate moments when the comments and observations from Twitter came to the fore for the people without open mobiles or laptops.

This meant a totally open back-channel continued as normal on Twitter, while the appropriate stuff was also highlighted for the hallowed ground of the stage at the right times.

I didn’t ask which, if any, of the Guardian staff twitterers were doing it formally, and which were just volunteering and helping out because they were there and it felt like the right thing to do. Perhaps a bit of both? Either way, it all felt pretty natural and was very effective. Meg, Chris, Kevin, Simon (and probably others I’ve missed) were all able to answer questions and either provide or relay additional info from the room (nice example from Simon regarding when the video will be online).

Regardless of whether you think the culling of one particular negative comment was justified and sensible or just an overly knee-jerk and defensive moderation decision, the fact that Chris and Meg were willing and able to join the discussion undoubtedly stopped the issue from escalating and overtaking the backchannel, and I noticed that it was immediately appreciated too.

Overall, the use of Twitter was excellent, and has given me plenty of ideas. Most of all, I’d like their code. :-) Instant update: Chris says they’ll be open sourcing the Twitter code next week. Hurrah. Oh, and says it again in the comments below. Double hurrah.

More links:
Guardian Activate 09 [programme, speakers]
‘#activate09′ Twitter hashtag
‘activate09′ tag on Flickr
‘#activate09′ images via Twitcaps
my photos

Notes from C21 Social Media Forum

2009-06-22T20:09:13Z

C21’s Social Media Forum said that the event would provide

a creative workshop that defines and develops how the producers channels and rights owners can work with social media platforms to develop business and extend creativity. And generate new revenue streams today!

Despite not being desperately bothered about generating new revenue streams, I was sufficiently interested by the rest of the description to book a place. Of course, I wasn’t really expecting it to deliver on its promise of being a ‘creative workshop’, and it didn’t. The event was more of a traditional conference, with speakers and time-for-questions. Overall, it was quite useful though, especially the morning sessions. Here are selected notes from some of the more interesting slots:

Opening keynote: Building brands with social media, Ann Longley (Digital strategy director, Mediaedge:cia)

how do we use social media, and what it means.
“You’d have to be living under a rock not to notice Twitter these days”
“What’s happening in Iran shows the power of social media beyond entertainment|
“press coverage of Twitter signals the ‘mainstreaming’ of social media”
What is social media anyway? Quote from MEC Guide to Social Media - “all online activities, tools, platforms and practices that allow users to collaborate, create, …”
“Traditional broadcasting model is breaking down”
social media is dominated by UGC: creating, sharing and remixing content
campaigning - e.g. NUS vs HSCB, M&S bra size cost, 13k on FB. There’s no such thing as local news any more.
organising protests has never been easier
finding out what people are saying about your brands online: “Many brands have fans online, even without actively cultivating it. It happens naturally.”
“smart brands cultivate their fanbase”
“smart fans influence brands” (or at least, influence brands which listen)
(while brands can avert crises by listening (Sony Bravia defusing negative story around Paint advert by monitoring online before it turned into a problem)
“…and invite their customers to help them”
What makes a good social media strategy? At the heart of any campaign you need a good product or service. Examples: Obama - being everywhere, T-mobile - UGC, Skins - energising their fanbase, Sony Ericsson - pocketTV, Dell - going from Dell hell to Idea Storm
content, communities and conversations = conversion (to £ or eyeballs)
social entertainment: social media enriching experiences. creative industries engaging audiences across channels
some examples of Alternative Reality Games (“it’s kind of a geeky thing, seen as quite left-field and not compelling for a mainstream audience…”, but interesting anyway) - cited McDonalds’ The Lost Ring, Superstruct, Penguin’s We Tell Stories
A Swarm of Angels….
earned media: word of mouth from friends and trusted people
Whuffie: in a post scarcity economy, reputation and social capital rule.

How to work with Joost to extend your entertainment brand, Henrik Werdelin (Chief creative officer, Joost)

people are increasingly consuming an audience online, but how do people find the stuff to watch?
social discovery is underdeveloped. The whole internet seems to be centered around Google and SEO
the web is bad at helping people find stuff they didn’t know they wanted to watch
new content discovery methods are algorithmic (amazon, joost, iplayer)
and equivalent to zapping / channel-hopping (i.e stumbleupon)
“you should watch this show about pandas” vs “28 of your friends really love this show…” - Joost uses FB connect to help with this sort of social discovery
‘ behaviour generated content’ AKA ’social triggers’: generating user content without having to do anything. e.g. FB activity feeds from status changes. Going from single to married used to be just a metadata change is now an item of activity in a feed. And an important one.
personalisation: subscriptions & data visualisation
realtime-web: co-watching. what are your friends doing right now?
2% creators, 8% particpators, 90% lurkers/passive viewers. How do you move the 90 into the 8 and 2?
Paradox of Choice
Joost design based on ‘freedom from choice’, i.e. preventing people feeling overwhelmed.

Using online narrative and social media to drive commercial value, Andrew Piller (Fremantle Media)

new media strategy: recycle, extend and create
era of self-expression & the rise of the prosumer
audience is broader than you think (not just 16-24 year olds) and niche communities are valuable
rules for content: personalised, participatory and narrative (if there’s no story, how will the audience engage?)
ingredients: linear narrative (lean back mode), non linear (lean forward / real-time), interactivity, community
“all of our experiences are underpinned by community”
Freak (goes live July 20th.) is a Freemantle co-production with MySpace currently in production (story from Broadcast Now) is the first UK online drama from MySpace. “We’d never let the audience decide the story but how they get there, the everyday decisions, can be affected and influenced by the audience”.
Lead character is a girl gamer. Brand partners include P&G (Tampax) and Red Bull. Brand opportunities for music, fashion, games, …
producer from Coronation St, director from Hollyoaks, creative prod from serial drama, AP is very young, we have a community manager.
Brands want new ways to talk to their customer
Brands (think they) want community “but don’t know how to create it”
Q: where did the idea come from? A: In house creative team for d
Q: how do you work with other social networks? A: YouTube platform where you can view the content too, but the experience is bespoke to MySpace. In the dream world you’d hyper-syndicate and use it to drive back to MySpace.
Q: do you need MySpace? A: Brands are nervous about the space, so it’s easier if you have a distributor on-board. Industry needs a gamechanger to prove the model. Kate Modern & Lonely Girl were good examples, but the scale and production values were not there.
Q: how does the international model work? A: Not geo-blocked. We’ve cleared the rights internationally, but we’re not going to promote internationally. We think we can take the format to US market or European territories later.
Q: who owns the content and format? A: Intellectual Property is owned by Freemantle, but the UK series is co-owned by MySpace.
Q: is a TV series on the agenda? A: It’s not the on the agenda, but it’s talked about.

How Xbox used the social media space at E3, Maurice Wheeler (co-founder and planning director, Digital Outlook)

Microsoft asked us if we’d go out there and create a social media explosion around Xbox at E3. With 3 weeks notice. Gave us a view of what they’re presenting and announcing at E3.
we wanted to get the interesting info to social media power users / mavens / connectors
aggregation: wanted to focus people on our conversations. Listening to what people are saying. Consolidating to a stream of content which comes out of the social media cloud. “Sucking out the interesting and exciting content”. Feedback loop
providing content to a social media savvy audience in a way that they’re happy with an comfortable with
flew 5 influential gamer bloggers and 5 social media power users (including Charlie, to E3).
primary platforms: twitter, youtube, audioboo, kyte, flickr
secondary platforms: qik, 12 seconds, facebook, seesmic, bambuser, blip.tv, moblog, wordpress.com and many more
Q: how much of that would have happened without you? A: we can tell from the hashtag we used that we affected it [I'd agree. Just. Compare xboxe3 vs e3]
tips: create a #tag, have a distribution channel established, pick the right people, understand local technology constraints (e.g. make sure you’ve got wifi coverage), have a plan B, C and D

Inside the brain of Adam Curtis

2009-06-22T13:31:36Z

I don’t often talk about work projects, but I cant hold my tongue about this one. I’ve been rather excited about it for a while, and it went live today.

Adam Curtis is the documentary filmmaker behind ‘The Power of Nightmares‘, ‘The Century of the Self‘ and more. Recently, he’s done some pieces for Screenwipe about the rise and fall of the television journalist and another about ‘oh dearism’ in the news for Newswipe.

Well, he’s going to start blogging about his work and ideas on the BBC. In fact, the Adam Curtis blog launched today at bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis. Hurrah.

Adam writes: “This is a website expressing my personal views – through a selection of opinionated observations and arguments. I’ll be including stories I like, ideas I find fascinating, work in progress and a selection of material from the BBC archives.”

All rather exciting. Of course, the rights issues with some of the clips, and especially the music, make it hard to publish them all for an internet-wide audience and sadly some of the content has to be restricted to the UK for right reasons, but the plan is for as much as possible to be globally available as the blog goes forward.

Some related links:

It Felt Like a Kiss - Adam Curtis and Felix Barrett with Punchdrunk, original music by Damon Albarn - Manchester International Festival, 2nd - 19th July 2009
Guardian video about ‘It Felt Like a Kiss’
The Register - inside Adam Curtis’ funhouse
Update: (Saturday) - Charlie Brooker’s piece in this weekend’s Guide has an interview, and concludes with “TV industry! Here’s a little bombshell for you. From now on, all of Curtis’s work will be produced first and foremost for the internet…”

While I’m pimping BBC blogs, other recent-ish blog launches you might have missed:

Mark Beaumont Cycling the Americas
Last Chance To See with Stephen Fry and Mark Carwardine
BBC Comedy
Being Human
Mark Kermode (which has been around for a while, but I absolutely love the way he’s responding to comments).

3D TV

2009-06-18T09:18:45Z

[image: skooal on Flickr]

I went to a BAFTA event tonight, cunningly titled ‘3D: the next dimension in TV and Games?’. It served up a panel of Andrew Oliver (CTO and founder, Blitz Games Studios), Colin Smith (Technical Analyst, ITV), Brian Lenz (product design and innovation, Sky), chaired by Guy Clapperton (freelance journalist who has been writing about 3D TV for the Guardian).

The event began with a chance to learn about the three major approaches to full-colour 3D display today, and a chance to try out a couple of them. They are:

Active LCD shutter glasses darken one eye, then the other, in sync with the alternating image being shown on a standard display. This halves the effective frame rate by sharing the display across both eyes, and being an active system requires power to operate the shutters and also to be in sync with the display. Expensive glasses, but off-the-shelf (though high-end) screens or projectors. [more on wikipedia]
Passive polarised glasses work much like the old red and green glasses, but using polarised filters rather than red/green means you get a full colour experience. It means cheap, passive glasses but complicated and expensive screens and projectors. If you’ve seen a colour 3D movie, this was probably the way it was delivered. [more on wikipedia]
Autostereoscopic display is a stupid name for a screen which displays 3D without needing glasses by use of a lenticular or ‘parallax barrier’ layer in front of a specialised (usually LCD) display, presenting a different image based on viewing position. No glasses, but a very limited viewing angle. [more on wikipedia]

Of the three systems, all have benefits and drawbacks. There were no autostereo (i.e. glasses-free) products on display in the room, but the one I tried a couple of years ago was far lower quality than the two passive and active glasses systems I tried tonight. Both worked beautifully well, and in my quick test it was difficult to distinguish between them in terms of quality. Perhaps I need to see a more recent example of an autostereo display. (Any suggestions?)

For the other two, it’s really a tradeoff between cheap glasses and an expensive screen on the one hand, and a cheap(er) screen with expensive glasses on the other. Scale matters too; fitting out a cinema for an audience of hundreds is obviously a very different problem to kitting out your personal games computer, with equipping a living room TV (for broadcast or games) for a family of 4 falling somewhere in between. Does anyone out there have enough experience with the two technologies to have a preference for home use? I would have lived to see the same source being shown on both systems to compare them properly.

Technology: tick. What about the content? Starting with games, it’s simple enough for existing 3D games to be rendered in ‘real’ 3D rather than being flattened to a flat screen. It’s rendering problem, and since the graphics card in your computer already knows where the various objects are in three dimensions, spitting out the required output for any of the available 3D display systems is already possible.

To prove the point, Nvidia had provided an Nvidia ‘3D Vision’ equipped PC running Burnout Paradise in stereo 3D, and I must say it worked beautifully.

While rendering 3D games in 3D may be a more or less solved problem technologically, Andrew from Blitz pointed out that it’s also a design issue. Existing games have not been designed for 3D display, and while it works for some, Blitz wanted to start with a simple game designed for 3D and explore from there. They have a commercial release coming in the next couple of months; a console game which is a platformer with the 3D limited to just a few planes. It’s an intentionally simple first stab at a form in which they know they have a lot to learn. Andrew’s point was that games designers, like cinematographers, now have a new toybox of tricks, techniques and conventions to start playing with to get the best results out of 3D displays.

In television and film, stereo 3D content is equally easy in the case of computer generated (and hence a great many 3D movies so far have been CG), so perhaps it’s unsurprising that ITV’s biggest exploration of 3D TV so far seems to be building on Headcases, a satirical computer animation created in 3D, which obviously translates to stereo 3D telly very nicely (as I can confirm, having enjoyed a few minutes of it tonight).

Sky, meanwhile, have been using their existing infrastructure and experimenting with shooting everything from boxing to ballet, Gladiators and Keane in 3D.

The idea of taking existing 2D content and adding 3D perspective to it was mooted. Colin from ITV and Brian from Sky were both eloquent on the subject, saying that the filming and editing techniques used in creating good 3D content are not the same as in creating good 2D content. Eye strain is caused by making it difficult for the eye to resolve what you’re seeing, and cutting between shots forces people to re-focus, so 3D content will probably involve fewer cuts. The phrase that (I think Brian) used was “linger longer”. Taking what works well in 2D and simply 3D-ising it was repeatedly compared to Hollywood’s fad in the 20s of ‘colorization‘, something everyone seemed keen to avoid.

Brian (Sky) seemed tantlisingly close to wanting to announce something. He talked about getting past the experimentation phase and into the production phase: “we know exactly how to get there, it’s just a question of timing and conversations with TV manufacturers. You’ll see things happening in the next couple of years, for sure”. And later, “We’re not at the point right now of announcing a launch, but if the possibility of being part of another revolution in the way people watch TV is there, we want to be part of that, and we will be there, sooner rather than later.”

Other random points of interest…

Someone from the audience pointed out that the idea of a fixed ‘ocular distance’ of 2.5 inches (to match your eyes) between the camera lenses, is a myth. He pointed out that in fact, 2.5 inches is one of a myriad of distances that you’ll need to create depth, depending on what you’re filming. The panel agreed, saying that anything from a few millimeters to thousands of miles could be used, depending on the scale and distance of the thing you’re filming.
Where do you put subtitles? Andrew (Blitz) - found that ‘Hollywood 3D’ (’things jumping out at you’ from the screen) can be too much, and they like to limit it so things very rarely seem to come out from the screen, especially because subtitles, heads-up displays etc, work well at the 0 distance, ‘on the glass’.
Colin (ITV) - “this is a significant evolution”. He adds that in the film industry they say it’s the biggest evolution since colour. A bigger jump than SD (Standard Definition) to HD.
The DTG (Digitial Television Group) is leading the first consultation into 3D TV, is the consortium of consumer electronics manufacturers and broadcasters that will probably be responsible for bringing the industry together around common standards for 3D TV.
There are some great terms in this 3D TV business: ‘inter-ocular distance’, ‘decreasing binocular disparity’ and ‘multi-view auto-stereo’ were just three that I wrote down.

Great event. Fascinating stuff. Glad I went.

Update: Alan Patrick was there too and took much better notes than I did.

Second screen: this works for me

2009-05-30T08:57:06Z

It’s Wednesday, so it’s Apprentice night again. Tonight I’ve been using Visible Tweets on an open laptop next to the TV.

Ray was complaining about motion-sickness with Twitterfall running in the background. Visible Tweets (thanks to Andy for the tip) is a nice alternative.

Eye-catching, simple and beautiful in full screen mode, it’s less comprehensive than Twitterfall but does show a selection of recent tweets at a pleasing pace. Here how it looks:

Laptop Stickers

2009-05-25T17:49:19Z

I’ve been collecting photos of laptop stickers for ages.

Here’s what my ever-changing MacBook Air looks like at the moment (click the image for the Flickr version, complete with notes).

I’m always on the lookout for more. If you want me to display your sticker, and don’t mind posting it to me, let me know so I can give you a mailing address. I mean, if I’m prepared to walk into meetings with ’sit on myspace’ emblazoned across the front of my lid, I should be able to cope with anything, right?

Press the red button now…

2009-05-17T14:49:39Z

This month, I’ve mainly been playing Burnout Paradise and rewatching The Wire.

Alternatives to ‘UGC’

2009-05-08T15:32:54Z

I’ve started reading the research paper on User Generated Content undertaken by Cardiff University and the BBC. ugc@thebbc: Understanding its impact upon contributors, non-contributors and BBC News.

The study involved 10 weeks of ethnographic shadowing in BBC newsrooms, interviews with 115 journalists and 12 senior managers, analysis of a range of radio and television broadcasts and online content, plus a MORI poll of the British public, an online survey and 12 focus groups. Phew. 63 pages of report means I have not read all of it yet, but Robin Hamman (who was involved in sponsoring the project, has digested it here. Most of it is centered around the use of contributions from users around News, but there are a great many interesting general observations in there, and will give me much to chew over in coming days.

One conclusion instantly caught my eye though:

“The term User Generated Content is inappropriate and inadequate and should be replaced with Audience Material”

And the paper goes on to use ‘Audience Material’ (in preference to ‘UGC’) throughout. Now, I have as many problems with the term UGC as the next person, and it’s not a new discussion, but I don’t really think ‘Audience Material’ is any clearer.

Material? It’s no more specific than content really. Just another general word for stuff.

Audience? If any word is going to make people at the BBC think of its users as content consumers, to whom we must broadcast, that’s probably the one. Please let’s not reinforce the idea that users are an ‘audience’ or, still worse, ‘consumers’ (as in ‘consumer generated media’. Urgh).

I don’t really have a better alternatives, though I’ve always thought that user contributed content was slightly nicer, if only because I like the emphasis on contribution over generation.

Any others?