January 2018 – 2-IMMERSE

Presenting to the presenter

DOUG WILLIAMS from BT R&D writes: Do take a look at this video from June 2017, taken during an Innovation Event at BT’s global research headquarters at Adastral Park in the UK. At this event BT shares its research, both internal and collaborative, with customers, the press, investors and colleagues.

We had the opportunity to demonstrate our stand-alone prototype of the MotoGP at home service. This prototype did not use the “proper” 2-IMMERSE infrastructure but the demo was good enough to allow us to share ideas with key influencers across the business. Their feedback, and our own assessment of how features actually appeared, helped us identify features we thought were most important. Responsive design and dynamic control, from a tablet, of a 360 bike-cam as a picture in picture on the main screen were the favourites.

It also gave us the chance to share our work with some of those who present BT Sport. In the video Andy Gower talks to Craig Doyle, one BT Sport’s main presenters.

Of course the service prototype we have built for evaluation is much more feature complete, as you can see from the summary video of the MotoGP experience but this early stand-alone demo allowed Andy to develop and test design ideas more quickly.

MotoGP at Home – the video

We are pleased to announce that we have made a short video of our MotoGP at Home Experience. You can find it on our videos page. https://2immerse.eu/videos/

The MotoGP experience is now (January 2018) in test. We are taking our 8 test kits out to users, and they are trying it out. Users have been screened on the basis that they are MotoGP fans (not everyone is) and watch it on TV. We had a small hiatus during Christmas (this gave us chance to upgrade the software on the machines too!) but with the Christmas decoration tidied away we are back out testing again. To date we have had 35 responses and by 25 January we should be pushing 90 responses. Our target is 100 responses.

What we want to know is, do our users prefer the multi-screen experience to the single screen experience?

The whole thing takes about 90 minutes, during which time users can explore the additional information and features that can be accessed and controlled on the companion screens. The questionnaire they complete after the trial probes their overall reaction to the experience before going deeper into their spontaneous recall of features (what do they remember it by?) and then probing their use, and perception of, the feature set on offer.

The MotoGP experience needs a specific small computer to act as set top box, as I wrote earlier https://2immerse.eu/its-trial-time/ . Because of this not many of you will get to play with it directly. The next best thing, in terms of communicating what this experience includes, is the video.

The trials are being conducted independently from the project by Acumen Fieldwork http://www.acumenfieldwork.com

We look forward to receiving a full set of results in due course and to comparing the questionnaire responses with the logs we collect from the servers. What features were used most? Were any features not used? These are all questions we hope the logs will tell us.

And, as the video expresses, our thanks are due to Dorna Sports, BT Sport and North One Television for their support during the development of the MotoGP 2-IMMERSE project.