Regular updates from the Internet Research & Future Services team in ±«Óãtv R&D, making new things on the internet. You can follow us on Twitter at .
Randomness is the flavour of the week, with the launch of a new experimental video player and some Twitter Bots.
±«Óãtv Shuffle
This week sees the launch of the new website, designed to highlight new and innovative ideas from the ±«Óãtv and its partners. This will include ideas developed in the innovation programme, as well as the latest prototypes emerging from . Andrew N and Libby have been busy preparing our first prototype for ±«Óãtv Taster, called as shown above. ±«Óãtv Shuffle is a video player which learns what you like, by noticing how long you watch one programme before clicking onto the next, turning your random viewing into a bespoke channel.±«Óãtv Taster is intended to gather feedback, as well as showcase new ideas, so try out and let us know you think!
Twitter Bots
Continuing the exploration of random selections, Libby has created two new Twitter Bots this week. The first, called tweets links to random programmes on iPlayer from ±«Óãtv 1 to 4, every 30 minutes. It's surprising what gems pop up from the depths of the schedules and it's guaranteed to inflate your bookmark list!With its ecletic mix of programmes, Radio Four deserves its own dedicated bot: which tweets links to random Radio 4 programmes you can listen to, twice an hour.
News Atoms
Barbara, Tristan, Ant and Andrew have been analyzing ±«Óãtv news stories tounderstand their structure and met with News to hear how they create and choose material for short videos. The goal was to understand the concept of variable depth within text articles, video or mixed media and to refine the concept of a News Atom - a sub-unit of a news story that contains the required elements to give a better understanding of one aspect of the story.They also took one particular major news story as an example and deconstructed it into potential news atoms which could be used to reconstruct and present the story in variable depth. This would allow the user to explore the story in as much or as little depth as they want, and allow them to dive deeper or explore the wider context if desired.
CODAM
Jiri has started the UX work for CODAM, our project on video fingerprinting and visual search, funded by . Together with Rob he has mapped out the key use cases of the system (finding similar content, or finding copies of the same content) which will help to identify what needs to be designed. His next goal is to conduct a series of interviews with roles across the ±«Óãtv that are outlined in CODAM's use cases. These interviews will inform the requirements for the next phase of work.
COMMA
Matt has completed the search integration work which will allow users of the COMMA system to search across the generated transcripts and extracted keywords for their archive.
Collaboration Activities
Joanne and Jiri, presented a seminar to UCL's HCI MSc students, explaining the role of the UX team within ±«Óãtv R&D. They explained how we approach various phases of prototyping, research and user trial activities, and shared our methods for low-fidelity prototyping, guerrilla research and running diary studies with high-fidelity prototypes. Finally, Joanne and Andrew N met with the to discuss shared research interests. They were shown the which explores connected devices and distributed interactive applications.
Interesting Links
- Nice , from Al Jazeera and the open source they used to make it (via )
- Designing for the slow web
- - an HTML5 media player and extensible framework for displaying synchronised metadata