| D O O R S O F P E R C E P T I O N 5 | |
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| Illuminations Group |  |
| PDF link for printable transcription | Andrew Chitty |
I'm part of Illumina, which is a new company, part of the Illuminations Group of very, very small companies, and the first UK production house devoted solely to working in digital and interactive television and convergent media. It's absolutely not relevant to this talk, but as a start-up, I just couldn't resist the plug. So if anybody would like to contact me about other things we do, I'm drew@illumina.co.uk ? Okay, so 6 minutes 40 seconds to explain 'inhabited television', media hybrids, what are they and what are we doing. Well, we're focussing on two particular areas. One - because we like inventing new phrases; it always seems to go down well with magazine publishers if not with audiences - one is we call 'broadcatching'. And that's working with audiences as producers to make interactive television for digital channels. And I hope that during the panel discussion we'll go on and talk about some of those notions, and I think Femke is working on similar things. But this is a Show-and-Tell session. And I'm mainly going to show our other type of media hybrid which we're working on, 'inhabited television'. But before I show our latest project, one minute of tale first never really goes amiss and perhaps puts thing in context. So what is inhabited television? Well what it isn't is web-TV. So please put all of those ideas of Internet alongside TV out of your mind. What we're talking about is a hybrid of television and 3-D social or virtual spaces which have become so popular on the Internet. We call it inhabited TV because our aim is to give the audience a place where they live, represented by avatars inside the television, where they can participate while they're watching. Now the thing I'm going to show you is the third evolution of our notions of inhabited TV. And just quickly I'll tell what we've done so far. Our first one was an avatar-based 3-D social space called The Mirror, which we ran along side our TV series at BBC 2 called The Net. The Mirror lasted for six weeks, had 2,000 inhabitants, and developed some complex social events, including debates, collaborative gaming, and even an art exhibition. The second evolution we wanted to go for was to start experimenting with actually broadcasting. So with Channel 4 television, British Telecom and Sony, we broadcast last year the first television show live from inside a virtual world. The audience watching could log in and participate in a game show as it developed. Heaven in Hell - Live, as we called it, was an exciting technological demonstration. But to be honest if one watched it on television, it was chaotic, unstructured and a complete mess. So we could broadcast from inside a virtual world but we hadn't got the content right, we hadn't made it into television. We got the interaction there but it wasn't a television programme. So as part of Arena, a publicly-funded research project, with our collaborators at Nottingham University, we've tried to step back from the problem of broadcasting live and try and sort out some of the programming challenges. And what I'm gonna show you is a demonstration that we performed at September's ICU digital art event in Manchester in England, which proved to be a problematic concept for what is a light-hearted and trivial game show. Let's hope it goes down better at Doors, talking about play. So again, we're working with a conventional TV idea, that of a game show, where the audience can interact with the series of challenges within a virtual world. This time the team members, rather than log-in on from home were participating over a local area network, but were rather isolated from each other and from the audience. The program, the output of the virtual world by virtual cameras within it, was broadcast into a theatre space. And that theatre space, and the audience sitting there, represented the TV audience who had some form of interaction. So it's a hybrid of the Internet, television and maybe even theatre in this case. We called it Out of This World.
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url: DOORS OF PERCEPTION |
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