Category: technology

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What Screens Want by Frank Chimero

Lace up your boots and dive right into this article What Screens Want which will be doing the rounds at conferences and talks for months to come and rightly so:

One of the reasons that I’m so fascinated by screens is because their story is our story. First there was darkness, and then there was light. And then we figured out how to make that light dance. Both stories are about transformations, about change. Screens have flux, and so do we.

So the pep talk is that things are starting to suck, but there’s a capacity for change in what we’ve made, who we are, and what we believe. Everything was made, and if we want, we can remake it how we see fit. We only need to want it.

And then we have to build it.

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Richard Gregory lecture 2013

On 28th October 2013 the Bristol vision institute hosted the annual Richard Gregory lecture in the Wills Building, University of Bristol. The talk was titled ‘Better than being there – Being there better, How technology is shaping the future of media’.

Matthew Postgate has the job of shaping and leading research and development for the BBC. His talk covered the approach the BBC is taking to embracing emerging technologies, practices and coping with the challenges that brings for a global organisation. Here are my notes:

  • Evaluation of tools to educate and entertain which is the mission of the BBC
  • Broadcast is considered a system of creation, delivery and consumption which hasn’t changed much since 1922
  • Key theme of change is now we are in the information age
  • IP end to end
  • Data centric
  • New devices and new interfaces
  • This has led to a change in how we create media to deal with the shift
  • The new broadcast system is split between create, deliver, consume and the BBC have four themes as a framework: immersive, pervasive, data rich and interactive (personal and adaptive)
  • IMMERSIVE: trying to get to the halo deck from star trek
  • 2012 Olympics used super hi vision
  • 8k cameras which are 16 times quality of current HD and uses 22 surround sound – sound not only left to right but also up and down
  • Showed an example of using the oculus rift VR headset and a 360 camera to film music practice
  • PERVASIVE: Ability to be everywhere and showing live events on mobile to complement
  • Designing for four screens: TV, desktop/Laptop, tablets and mobile are considered for all design
  • Hewlett Packard say ‘information as a utility’
  • We expect to arrive and be able to use and consume immediately
  • Wallpaper thin television using tablet control is coming in the next 20 years
  • Friends and family can join you from their location to watch things remotely together
  • Different surfaces emerging
  • Media will become more contextual as there is already more media than we can possibly consume
  • Media will begin to seek you out based on what systems know you consume using software agents
  • DATA RICH: no longer sealed, more akin to datasets
  • Will be commonplace to overlay data to your screen, even during live events
  • INTERACTIVE, PERSONAL, ADAPTIVE
  • You’ll be able to zoom into the screen
  • Interactive to become personal
  • Adaptive abilities enabling previously fixed programmes to change, such as using your location to alter the activity live, such as using your local weather during a radio show
  • We shouldn’t lose sight of the storytelling
  • If we can take the traditional broadcast skills and add new science and then combine we’ll have even better broadcasting
  • We should be brave in re-inventing broadcasting
  • The use of contextual media will mean that your device knows your activity and will deliver the right type and length of content based on expected location, calendar entries etc

 

 

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Week 20

This week, in between three days out at events, my mind began to wander towards our team and service activity for 2014. In short I have been thinking about the scope of the work, embedding digital into our daily activity (hat tip to Michael Edson) and getting things done. After a few months to settle in, I now have clean air to run in with a better sense of some actionable work. I must focus and ensure we ‘DO’ now. Here at the highlights of the week:
  • I attended the local tedx event, Tedxbristol 2013. Lots of students in attendance who I enjoyed earwigging
  • World usability Day hosted at the M Shed and a great 1 track affair with a diverse agenda
  • Disaster planning
  • Team catch ups and progress meetings
  • Reviewed the student as producer project requirements before their deadline
  • Uk Museums on the web 2013 hosted at Tate Modern in London. 120 or so of my peers in a 1 track informal series of talks about work recently done and plans for 2014. I met a very friendly and supportive bunch who I look forward to working with in the near future. The 5:30am bus to London I enjoyed less!
  • Discovered youtube tv which enables you to send videos to your TV from any device on the same network.
  • Released v1 of our service Digital Principles into the wild. These will really help us in the coming months and support the digital strategy which is coming soon. The 8 principles began life as over 150 scraps of paper that I collected from conversations with my team, other groups in the sector, the service, funders and partners.
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Digital Principles for Bristol Museums Service

Digital continues to permeate throughout the service by way of our  internal processes and by our users.  The Office for National Statistics shows that 86 percent of UK adults have used the internet at least once in the past three months. Physical location is no longer the defining factor when we refer to users of our service. In order to effectively use our spaces and reach the widest audience digital needs to be at the very core to the Bristol Museums, Galleries and Archive service. We need to offer digital services that will enable us to help deliver our mission. These digital principles allow us to ask “why” for all future digital direction.

UPDATE: I have moved the principles to their permanent home over on the Bristol Museums, Galleries and Archive labs blog.

 

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Week 19

This week was a mixed bag of different activity with the biggest excitement meeting three groups of students from the University of Bristol.
I kicked off the week attending Digital Bristol workshop at the Colston Hall for the morning sessions. We got to hear from local business such as Aardman animations who are working with Rolls-royce to see how Aardman ‘bottle’ creativity. Taking 15 years to produce a new engine is too long! We heard from local funding pots about the various flavours of borrowing and grant available. After the kickoff session I sat in on the ‘playable City’ strand to hear from the Watershed, Council and ibm about projects they have been doing to get the public involved. I made a comment about strangers not wanting to play with other complete strangers but rather the people they are with, which most folk didn’t agree with.
A service wide review of our current budget position took a large amount of my energy carrying on from the previous week. Enough said.
I met with the retail manager to explore our online shop options including ebay and amazon as options. I vaguely recall a few museums selling via these channels so will be doing a bit more discovery around this. Get to the people without re-inventing the wheel was the general vibe.
I completed my final Health and safety workshop
I attended an evening ‘debate’ about profit in the heritage sector. It was less of a debate and more storytelling from the speakers. A few useful views were made by the audience.
We will be showing an exhibition next October called ‘Moved by Conflict’ at the M Shed Museum around World War 1 and the involvement of people from Bristol. I got to sit with one of our in-house designers to see how these get planned and executed. I will be exploring the digital engagement aspect and had to submit some thoughts. We’ll be looking at sensors, RFID, motion tracking and displaying stories in new ways for the service rather than passive projection and iPads.
I saw some great work by our collection team who are working on migration of data from an old system to our collections management system.
Heard about an idea for crowd funding.
During a meeting with two different UWE factions I mentioned my 2014 idea for ‘bringing the museum out into the City’ which was very positively received. I MUST put these ideas on the blog as I think this thread of an idea has legs.
I have been on call to support the 3 day MuseomixUK event up at Iron bridge, thought the one time I could of been of use I didn’t have my laptop with me!
Cleared up some confusion around our intentions for a website plan for 2014. If anybody can point to helpful material on ‘cases for museums to have their own non-council website’ that would be most welcome.
My personal highlight of the week was meeting three groups of students who will each be producing a digital outcome for the service. Each group is from the University of Bristol Computer Science department on their second year and working with us as part of their course. I canvassed the service for problems that needed solving and three were selected. The kickoff meetings went well and I have great hopes for the outcomes in due course. Partnership working that is working!
Stepped on a few toes…

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REACT Lunchtime Talk: Elements of Interactive Storytelling

During his lunchtime talk Daniel Burwen explained that careful consideration of the four elements plus the four spaces equals coherence for storytelling using technology. Here are my notes for the talk Elements of Interactive Storytelling.

  • The four elements are User experience,  Story, Technology and Aesthetics
  • The four spaces are Hearth, Reading nook, Anywhere and Workbook
  • The spectrum of Narrative mechanics between Games (interactive and mechanic depth) and Films (passive and emotional complexity)
  • Doing (games) vs feeling (films)
  • 1978 laser disc
  • 1983 dragons lair – depth was press button to not die
  • 1985 Mario brothers run, jump’ stopm’ kick shoot
  • 1991 another world – cut scenes appear
  • 1993 virtual fighter – 3d games emerge, camera language and large data
  • Mechanical depth and emotional complexity
  • Uncanny valley for virtual characters
  • Last of us game – unified aesthetic between film and game. The game is built for mechanical depth and is highly abstract
  • Attention economies for TV, laptop, tablet and mobile vary but the longer the attention the higher the value.
  • TV is $10- $60, mobile is free to $5
  • Focusing on tablets gives a good trade-off
  • Game called winosill might be helpful for displays e.g. at blaise Castle Museum 🙂
  • Mouse and keyboard vs touch
  • Interactive narrative is a goal as you can get mechanical depth and emotion
  • New PS4 and Xbox enable body movement and may be tipping point beyond control pads
  • Oculus rift headset – the less abstraction in interface the more emotional connection we can have and this type of device may be the new era post control pad
  • So where is this going? from first moving image film to Citizen Kane was a breakout experience for its time and it has been 41 years since pong
  • Wii came put in 2006 and since then we have great things across all the devices eg the oculus rift’ and Xbox kinnect, maybe we are about to bring them together

Since making my notes I have stumbled across the talk as a slidedeck on Prezi which you should check out.

 

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GDS Service Manual – the ebook

Back in July Jukesie asked if I could knock out the GDS Service Manual for his commute and as a handy guide to refer back to.

I completely forgot I did this ebook and meant to stick it online somewhere so here it is…kinda. It was a bit of a rush so PLEASE do let me know about missing/broken bits.

I have the EPUB version (ipad, tablets of all flavours etc) and Kindle kicking around. As I am still on holiday the epub will have to do for now as I don’t have access to my FTP and WordPress has a 2mb limit (aargh).

Soon I will post the epub and Kindle properly, not from my phone abroad when I’m meant to be offline !

Note that I purposefully left out the YouTube videos as myself and others may not regularly have WiFi so I figured this was a fair compromise. If there is interest in the video I can put one out.

I hand coded this file so there may be errors which are likely mine!

I hope you’ll find it useful as I know Matt Jukes and I have.

 

 

 

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Introducing the Mac Mini to the toy box

At the museum we have a collection of devices for tasks such as running our video projectors and as interactive kiosks (widely used at M Shed and the Egypt gallery at Bristol Museum and Art Gallery) .
Some of the kit dates back 5-8 years and I need to get my head around repairing, replacing and planning for the future in the area referred to as “interactives”. Some of the oldest devices are Mac Mini computers. I began to wonder if these needed replacing “like for like” or if we should look at alternatives. Either way I figured having a number of tablets, mac mini computers and PC equivalents (e.g. Arduino or Raspberry Pi) to begin tinkering with would be a good idea. As yet I don’t have an R+D budget and I’m not sure I ever will so I asked twitter if anybody had some older kit that they wouldn’t mind parting with.
Very kindly Mark Annand raised his hand and gifted me a Mac mini PowerPC G4 running 10.5.8.
I now have a device that I can start to play around with – should it be used as a kiosk, can multiple computers be connected and controlled (with dropbox serving files), and all the common uses for kiosk requirements. I stumbled across a blog post on mac mini configuration by Graham Thorne which sounds well researched and road-tested so i’ll probably start here. Of particular interest is getting notifications when a device fails to start-up which is an inevitable consequence of running many devices.
So watch this space!
Also if anybody has played much with computers as kiosk and control devices i’d love to hear from you.
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My first month at the museum

This week marks the end of my first month working as Technical Development Manager across Bristol Museums, Galleries & Archives.
The role is positioned around supporting ‘everything digital’ across our 5 locations AND the web.
What makes this exciting is that we need to work with digital for people on-site and online as museums attract tourists from around the globe as well as researchers.
I have spent much of my time meeting people across the service and being nosey about what they do, how they do it and if they have ideas we can develop.
I have been grappling with tools to capture ideas, to-do lists and seeing a map of the activity with Trello starting to look a real winner.
The breadth of work is very diverse but nowt I haven’t come into contact with in previous jobs.
I have a very supportive boss and I manage a small team of 4 who have a wealth of experience to help tackle our plans. The local digital scene really has come on leaps and bounds in the last 5 years and I have been meeting an inspiring range of artists, academics and business folk.
In addition to the normal run of work I managed to speak at the ARLIS conference on self-publishing and attended the excellent UXBristol.

IF you have any thoughts on digital in the museum space do get in touch, i’d love to hear from you.

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First use of the Oculus Rift VR headset

Me about to try the headset

Yesterday I got to use the developer version of the Oculus Rift headset which provides an immersive gaming environment. Stephen Gray got the headset a few weeks ago and has already been making some headway into building his own environments.

Essentially the headset design enables you to view a virtual world without any awkward gaps between your vision, the headset and the ‘real’ world. Two views of the virtual environment (as shown below) are overlapped and off you go.

Computer showing my VR view

It is hard to describe but the VR world does actually feel very real and my tiny brain was partly tricked into believing I was dropping from the clouds onto a runway. Because you can look anywhere with a smooth transition using your head, everything starts to feel natural.

I tested about 3-4 environments including a rollercoaster…then I felt my tongue start to dry and an odd feeling in my tummy. Fast forward an hour and back at home I started to feel a little sick… I have long suffered from a problem with the refresh rate on CRT screens and I wonder if this was triggered using the headset. When you switch game you leave the VR world and can see a really bad version of the computer desktop and I wonder if it was this switching that set me off.

I can see great potential in this type of tool for use in education, museums and the design industry. The headset brings the opportunities of the digital world into our natural ‘view’ of the world. Immediately I could see training scenarios, interpretation and gaming uses for the tool. It also strikes me as a true ’emerging’ and uniquely digital tool, maybe on the level of ‘touch’ devices. I wouldn’t put it into the bracket of a widely popular device for the average person, but certainly for niche markets in the short-medium term.

Once I have had the chance to have a better play i’m sure uses will start to come to me.

Now let me just sit down and recover.