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 .
This week: Radiodan, Docker, UCL Interaction Centre MSc Project Day, Audience Analysis and more!
Radiodan
The devices team held a Radiodan workshop with another team in R&D where they each tried to make a radio as a test of Radiodan, Describing their prototypes in their own words ...
- Libby - It's a , otherwise playing audio. Thinking around it and the practicalities of implementing it - including getting OpenCV face detection working on the Pi.
- Joanne - Making a . A radio that plays a series of episodes from Book of the Week (or similar). It will take the form of a book, and the chunky pages will hold the electronic components. I am making a maquette from foamboard to work out how the pieces fit together and to experience prototype the system. I'd like to make the final version in plywood.
- Dan - A radiodan that plays .
- Andrew - Allows you to easily listen to your favourite . Downloads the playlist, finds matching tracks in Spotify and plays them through Radiodan. A button on top will allow you to add anything you like to your own playlist.
Meanwhile Chris Needham has been continuing his efforts to adapt Radiodan to use VLC as it's media player which should give us support for more formats, as well as the ability to play video.
Docker
Me and Thomas have been heading up a bit of work to rethink our continous integration and deployment toolchain and much to Sean's delight have finally got around to taking a deeper look at .
So far we've been impressed, the ease of use and speed of starting up a machine was a pleasant suprise after years using Vagrant and Puppet, we are hoping that Docker can find a place in our development, build, and test stacks.
The jury is still out for production though and I get the feeling we need to do much more research before making a strong descision. The docker ecosystem seems young and there are many options for deploying containers for us to assess. We are also having to look very hard at container security and how we might want to use the third party images provided by the docker hub.
UCL MSc Project Day
We have done a number of collaborations with UCL students since moving to our shared office on the campus, and this week Joanne and Jiri attended MSc project day. They presented five project themes to the students, and answered their questions during the coffee break.
The themes were:
- Stories - how can stories be experienced in new ways? Programmes have traditionally been broadcast and watched in the way that an editor decided, linearly - but can we begin to dismantle programmes into individual parts of the story?
- News - how do audiences want their news? Can the format of the news adapt depending on where the user is, on what device and when? Are users looking for a different type of news than bulletins and news articles?
- Discovery experience - we're interested in exploring how much information should be displayed on a web page to help make a decision to click through. What combination of information leads to best content discovery experience?
- Appetite for serendipity - based on our previous research, we believe that people have different attitudes towards discovering content outside of their current interests or comfort zone. We'd like to explore what this means for systems that provide personalisation, and how this affects people's responses to serendipitous discovery.
- PIN & pair - can we design better pairing experiences around the current PIN retyping workflow?
Audience Analysis
Chris Newell has been at the European Broadcasting Union headquarters in Geneva, presenting an overview of work on data analytics in online broadcasting. This included monitoring of live and on-demand services, recommendation systems and a project looking at audience behaviour within programmes.
News atoms
Tristan, Barbara and Anthony are exploring whether it's possible make the news easier to understand by using atomised media.
They've reviewed and evaluated the prototypes made so far by the criteria:
- Is it short?
- Is it highly visual?
- Is it editorially feasible?
- Does it help me understand the wider context of the story?
Interesting links
Some interesting links suggested by the team ...
- Daniel Jones, who worked with Dan and Andrew last year on extracting sounds from Redux, has .