±«Óãtv

I've been struggling a little with where we're going with the Second Screen projects ultimately, but it does look like there's less prototyping work then we thought to get to the demo stage, so that's what we push on towards. By Monday afternoon Duncan has a basic image pushing application, based on his earlier XMPP quiz work. Vicky spends an evening watching a few episodes of Springwatch for research and is meeting people to better understand what we require and to identify the type of related links or content that could be pushed live to a second screen during the show. Chris B is starting to build a simple Flash webcam app on a for one of the demos and the design team are wireframing and photoshopping all three prototypes. We've just had a catch up and have a pretty clear idea of what we can achieve in the next week and a half.

Chris N and Mark have got a working RadioVis slideshow chain for all our national radio networks, and we can display it on a Pure Sensia and a prototype mobile client. Mark and Paul have been researching mobile marker tracking technologies, augmented reality and computer vision for smart phones. Lots of interesting stuff, some of which works surprisingly well. Sam is planning work on an XMPP poll prototype for P2PNext and investigating Safari extensions and Chris B has also been researching hardware options for our digital programme guide iPad/MythTV system. I spend most of Wednesday afternoon practicing the Digital Friendship demo for a presentation while Chris N polishes off the remaining bugfixes and tweaks. On Thursday Vicky and Tony are in Manchester for a brainstorm about brain computer interaction to generate ideas for single switch accessible interfaces with the aim of using the Emotiv headset as an input mechanism for set-top boxes.

We have demos and chats this week with the 6 Music interactive team, ±«Óãtv Childrens, Vision Multiplatform and TV Platforms. And Tom Bartindale from the visited. He's researching "extreme" interfaces in the ±«Óãtv - "Many of these scenarios are extreme in the sense that traditional interface designs are not suited for the setting, for example you would not choose to use a mouse as the primary input for a system based on the back of a moving truck, as the mouse would constantly be falling off.". Finally, as background for some future work, Sean and Theo observed The One Show from the gallery - to get a better understanding of live TV production, the team structure and the work flow.