It’s not ‘or’, it’s ‘and’.
Anyone who has witnessed the machination of senior leaders as they try to make clear the actions and behaviours that will drive positive change in an organistaion will be familiar with the “It’s not ‘or’, it’s ‘and’”. So what is such a phrase doing in research project?
Well it came about as John Wyver from illuminations was visiting project colleagues from BBC and IRT as they were embarking on some synchronisation experiments. John Wyver is leading on two of the prototype services being developed in 2IMMERSE, both are related to filmed theatre and the way it is presented, you can read about the At Home case here and the At School case here.
The question the experiments from the BBC and IRT was setting out to answer was ‘how closely synchronised should a script, displayed on a second screen device like a tablet, be to the action being displayed on the main TV screen?’ This synchronisation is, we must imagine, one of the more generous levels of synchronisation challenges in the project. At least it is generous when compared to the synchronisation of different camera angles on the same action, which could be a requirement of the MotoGP and Football prototypes (I suspect that this will require near frame accuracy, i.e 0.02-0.04 seconds) but it will be interesting to find out. Now, we haven’t got the answer yet for our script synchronisation problem. What do you think 1-2 seconds?
Important as this script synchronisation question is, other questions also need to be answered such as:
- how do users think they would use the synchronised script – i.e.. how often would they look at the script, and for how long?
- why might users look at a script? What benefits do they think it might have? Do they think it will help with audibility, will it help clarify meaning, or enhance the experience in some other way?
If script synchronisation is important, and I think it is, these question are also important if not critical. It’s not that we should answer only these motivation and utilisation questions though; you see it’s not OR it’s AND. And, as Rik says, never giving up.
