I attended the BBC Knowledge Multiplatform briefing day yesterday. The strategy outlined by Simon Nelson and others thankfully counteracted the soporific effects of being located in an airless room in the bowels of Broadcasting House, as the sun beat down on the London streets (it ain’t called the ‘big smoke’ for nothing).

Here are the highlights:

On ‘Permanence’ – Signalling a radical shift from the ephemerality of the linear broadcast slot, the BBC now has a system to automatically generate a permanent web page for every programme episode which, over time, can be further enriched with ratings, recommendations, synopses, AV, track listings and so on. As well as prolonging the life of the content beyond transmission and making it findable and linkable, the system has released time and budget previously spent on often rapidly pulled together and under-performing programme-related sites.  It’s currently in its beta version - visit it here.

So far so good; I can find out more about that track I liked in last week’s Mad Men for example. But what is so much more exciting is the prospect of applying the same system to the BBC archive – tens of decades of radio and television content opened up and made findable, shareable and mashable. Of course, as with most BBC projects of this scale and ambition – from the launch of BBC Two through expansion from terrestrial to digital in the late 90s to the launch of the iPlayer in late 2007 - the usual debates around public service and commercialism will no doubt rage.

Will the content be free at the point of use? Will it be limited to British people as licence-fee payers or made globally available but at a fee to non-UK residents? How might the release of such content impact upon the broader commercial market? These are just some of the potential areas of contention. I assume the findings from the Creative Archive pilot will feed significantly into the BBC’s thinking from here.

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The Codeo is a contrary beast; he hibernates all summer long while the students he depends on for his existence bask in the sun instead of in the warm glow of their computers. As he sleeps, he sees strange dreams. Probably something like this:

(explore Codeo winners and challenges by clicking the images)

What next? Since we kick-started the Codeo back in October last year, we’ve seen many wild and wonderful things, and we hope that next year will bring yet more techtastic solutions to our challenges. Have a great summer, and watch this space for the return of Codeo in autumn!

Augmented Reality (AR) is the practice of adding computer-generated information to something you are experiencing already. Often, this involves injecting computer-generated images into a live video feed, and there’s some very impressive stuff out there which sees computers spotting special tokens (fiduciary markers is the jargon name) and overlaying images or videos.

However, it turns out that there is another, simpler way of letting the computer know what you are looking at: if you can specify the exact location of the camera in relation to what it is viewing, then you can go ahead and enhance things to your heart’s delight, without having to go around tagging everything with markers.

As an example of this, I’ve found that augmented reality has become a lot more, err, real, thanks to my new phone, an HTC Dream. It contains some handy embedded hardware that means it knows exactly where it is and where it’s pointing (the GPS tells it where it is on Earth, the accelerometer tells it which angle it is pointing relative to the surface, and the compass tells it which direction it is facing relative to the poles).

One application that takes advantage of this is Wikitude AR - it will search publicly available sources of information, and then overlay their position on top of the camera feed from the phone, as you can see from these screenshots taken while I was looking out of our office windows:

Then, there’s the truly amazing Google Sky Map: you simply point your phone at the area of sky that you are interested in, and it will overlay constellation information. You can also type in a search term (e.g. Venus), and it will give you a handy arrow and target, helping you to swing your phone round until you are pointing right at it. This is extremely useful for any other parent who has been pestered by their child wanting to know what that bright star is called…

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I just took at trip to see the University of Brighton degree shows and saw some great work. Here’s a few of my favourite bits.

Richard Carey had a beautiful screen printed poster commemorating Edgar Allan Poe’s cryptography work. Apparently Poe claimed in 1840 that he could break any code that was sent to him, and this poster shows his working method.

Emily Cross did a really nice series of screenprinted illustrations responding to an ‘almost alphabetical’ journey made around East Sussex, called From Alfriston to Wilmington.

Benjamin Phillips filled his space with loads of little drawings, paintings and etchings, and it looked great. He’s got a mad imagination - some of his images reminded me of one of my favourite artists Marcel Dzama.

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We like art.

You’ll probably be quite quick to point out that given our long history of working with museums and galleries, this isn’t the most surprising of statements; but it’s true. So it was a rewarding opportunity for us to recently work with Arts Council England to use the internet to gather people’s thoughts about art - a project which has given birth to Hello Art.

Hello Art is part of a campaign by Arts Council England to encourage those people in the general public who may have had less access to art to engage with it and really start to get passionate about it. By asking visitors questions (which will change regularly over the site’s life), the site will not only get people sharing their thoughts and feelings, but also allow us to display the information about people’s opinions in really nifty ways.

To give you an impression of the level of diversity of opinion that the site has already conjured up, take a look at some of the responses to the current question, ‘what’s the best art you’ve ever experienced?’ Contributions so far have included marriage proposals, a birthday card, the opening scene of a theatre performance, a cathedral and even vegetables! By getting people to share their ideas directly with each other, we’re hoping people’s appetites for an artistic fix might be whetted and that healthy debates and discussions will begin to arise as people share their thoughts and feelings

Take a look at the previous posts the site has been receiving to get a real idea of just how varied people’s views are and how invigorated we can be by the art we love - and don’t forget to check back regularly for new questions and inspiration. Hello Art is set to grow and evolve so there’s a lot more to come from the young site.

Ian Smith and I have just got back from Newcastle after the launch of the Great North Museum, for which we provided lots of AV and interactive displays. I took a couple of hours to explore the city and visit the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art. There were two main exhibitions running when I visited; an exhibition of artworks inspired by Darwin, and a show called Tilting Planet by the American artist Sarah Sze.

I had never heard of Sze before, and was completely amazed and excited as soon as I walked into her exhibition. The show filled most of one floor of the Baltic Centre -a gallery converted from a 1950’s flour mill. Sze uses familiar, everyday objects (think matchsticks, wool, lamps, screws) to create beautiful, delicate and highly complex structures within a space. Seemingly never ending lengths of wool had been wrapped around pillars, sewn through the floor, threaded through air vents so that you had to carefully weave your way around the space. Branches grew from the floor, pendulums were suspended from the ceiling; the work seemed endless.

The Darwin exhibition was also great. I found out about an artist from Newcastle who was exhibiting here called Ben Jeans Houghton. I loved his piece - he had reconstructed his studio / greenhouse in the gallery and filled it with his lifelong collection of found objects, meticulously arranged and colourcoded.

It’s brilliant - if you can get to the Baltic to see the show, it’s well worth it. It’s a beautiful space, free, and in a great city too.

Last Saturday saw Brighton’s first Outdoor Gaming festival (a.k.a. BOGfest), organised by Richard Vahrman, COO of innovative GPS-gaming company, Locomatrix. The day featured a variety of games, mainly featuring mobile phones, so I thought what better way to contribute than to resurrect the Hunt the Wumpus game that I originally created to demo at Brighton Barcamp back in 2007.

For those of you unfamiliar with the game, the idea is to navigate around a series of interconnected rooms and to shoot the Wumpus before he eats you, all while avoiding other hazards such as giant bats and bottomless pits. The original 1970s version was entirely text based, but my updated version uses a series of Quick Response (QR) barcodes to represent each room in the maze. Players scan the codes using a camera phone, and are given clues on their telephone handset.

In its first incarnation I printed these codes out on stickers, and created a cave on a roll of wallpaper. For BOGfest, however, I thought it needed to be much bigger, so I regenerated the codes on A3 sheets of paper (all hail OpenOffice, which, because of its XML format, allowed me to automatically generate the document instead of manually inserting all the graphics). I then enlisted the help of my sons to stick these bits of paper on a 10m x 10m area of Hove promenade, and to draw the rooms and tunnels in coloured chalk.

Then it was just a case of helping people get the barcode software running on their phones (or just lending them one of the Cogapp R&D handsets) and letting them get on with it. During the afternoon dozens of people played, and it was fascinating to watch their reactions: everything from extremely skeptical (”what are you selling? How much does it cost to play?”) to the extremely enthusiastic (”this is a lovely idea”).

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Working on the project as AV producer, our main challenge was to strike the right balance between the variety and scale of the operation and the limitations of our budget, never forgetting that the audience’s experience is really what counts the most. Here’s the story behind just a handful of the 10 AV presentations we created…

Right Whale

For the glass-bottomed boat exhibit, the museum asked us to create the effect of looking over a parapet onto a plate of glass with temperate sea creatures swimming beneath it. So we needed to provide moving images of a whole host of creatures, from whales to whitebait as viewed from above. Of course, the problem for us was that most of the time, anybody who videos fish will do so in the water face to face, not looking down at their dorsal fins!

The first solution was to computer generate them, and we were ready to do that, but it just wasn’t possible within our budget. Instead, as well as trawling the best film and video archives in the world I took my own camera to several Sea Life Centres on the South Coast and dangled it into the water to capture footage of desirable species from above. Luckily for us, the larger creatures we found in the libraries - whales, dolphins and turtles etc - often swim on their side, so there’s plenty of footage of them swimming by with their backs to the camera. When the display is seen from above, this gives you just the right effect.

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Some more background on the interactives we’ve recently installed at the Great North Museum…

Medieval Case Study

This looks at how archaeologists can find out about how people used to live from the objects they left behind - and imagines what objects from today will survive for the next 1,000 years. Aimed at a younger audience, this interactive is bright and breezy - but crucially is gauged towards a fairly short visit time and gets lots of information across in a punchy and engaging style.

The Orientation Map

This is one of the ‘big ticket’ items in the museum; a pair of interactive map tables that allow users to explore Northumbria and its key sites of interest.

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We’ve just installed 15 interactives and 10 AV presentations at the brand new Great North Museum in Newcastle. The museum launched on Saturday and - as a combination of four existing museums - is an incredible mix of Prehistory,  Roman Britain, Ancient Egypt, nature and the environment. We’re proud to have our work in this fantastic museum.This project adds another string to the Cogapp Violin* as it is made up of many separate deliverables, as opposed to one deliverable with many parts (like MoMA.Guide,  ParaData and countless other goodies). Here’s a quick look at some of the interactives; we’ll look at the AV bits in another blog.

Diversity of Life

When visitors first enter the museum they are greeted by the massive Diversity of Life wall. Two stories high and running the entire length of the opening gallery, the wall is home to hundreds of animal specimens, grouped into Tropical, Temperate, Desert and Polar regions.It would be impossible to provide useful signage in this environment - and that’s where digital comes in. We’ve built eight interactives which give users access to a digital recreation of the wall and lets them find out more about each animal. It’s a simple idea but the beauty of it is in the execution; there is almost no interface and the interactive does only a few things - but very very well.

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