News from NEMSummit 2017

DOUG WILLIAMS from BT R&D reports from Madrid:

For the last couple of days I have been at the NEM Summit 2017 in Madrid. This is an annual gathering of researchers and people from the European Commission, together with a smattering of government policy makers as well.  The Summit is trying to understand and accelerate the definition of the research agenda around media and content.

Some of the Summit was about policy concerns relating to so-called fake news, a phenomenon I prefer to call lies. This is a bit off-topic for 2-IMMERSE but I am writing a parallel post about it as I found it interesting and, importantly, encouraging. Watch out for that post in the next 24 hours.

Apart from the policy stuff the Summit also provides a platform for people to share recent research results, and it’s in that role that I was attending – to share some of the recent 2-IMMERSE work.

I presented two early studies from 2-IMMERSE.  One was one of our first service prototype which we called  Theatre at Home.  This was the first experience built on our micro service platform and it allowed two households to share the experience of watching a live screen performance together.  The video is here and the schematic of the technology is shown here:

The presentation I gave, slightly annotated so it works better without an accompanying voice over, is below. nem-theatre-nov-2017-all-slides-explanatory-no-video  To be honest, the trial was not perfect. We struggled with a number of aspects of the trial, but that is as it should be.  As some wag has said,  ‘if we knew what we were doing it wouldn’t be research, would it?’

My second talk was about an assessment of football clips — and I wrote a blog post about this earlier in the year. We were exploring whether there was a way to assess if one format — that used three screens — was better or more impactful than another — which used only one screen).  You can see an outline of comparative clips in this video. Once again the presentation itself – again slightly annotated to help it be readable without a vice over – is included below. nem-football-nov-2017-all-slides-explanatory-no-video  Our conclusion, which was based on responses from over 200 judges, is that we are 95% certain the preference reported for the three screen example was not by chance.