We had some people come in over lunchtime and give an interesting presentation on a website/application they were working on called ’show me how to play’ - basically it allows you to see how instrumental parts are put together to make up various songs. However apparently the next step in the site will be to bring in a live / collaboration element - sort of like an iChat A/V for musicians! www.showmehowtoplay.com

I took part in an interesting event on Saturday, the ‘Great Trafalgar Square Freeze’. The basic idea is you get loads of people to gather in one place (I heard about it through the magic of facebook), a trumpet then sounds and everyone freezes into a position leaving others wondering what’s going on.

Anyway it was quite a spectacle, and really interesting to gauge people’s reactions - someone has put together a video of the event here, also check out the New York video which for some reason seemed more effective …

Am currently watching Mark Kermode’s Film Reviews live on Radio 5 … the quality of the stream is pretty good and it’s actually quite interesting viewing - another example of the blurring between TV and radio?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/fivelive

A great story on BBC news this morning: Australia says sorry

An interesting development to come out of BBC Research and Development recently - ‘surround video‘

“Surround Video is a means of visually immersing the viewer into a TV programme.

It is like surround sound, an optional extra that enhances viewing on a normal display. The idea is to use a wide angle (or fisheye) camera fixed rigidly alongside the normal camera shooting the programme, and to project the image onto the walls, ceiling and floor of the viewer’s room.

The image is scaled and positioned to ensure that it aligns up with the existing TV, and warped to compensate for the distortion effects that come from the wide-angle lens and projection system. Although the projected image will be dimmer and of lower resolution than the main image, it nevertheless gives a strong feeling of immersion, particularly with motion cues being visible in the viewer’s peripheral vision”

Apart from watching episodes of Peep Show the funniest thing I’ve seen on YouTube recently is from these guys. Classic videos here, here and here.

Wow, that was pretty amazing - reminds me of that first time of going to see Jurassic Park in the cinema! Anyway didn’t really want to blog too much about the film (apart from that you should see it … now), but what I thought was really interesting is just how much “seeding” went on to promote it, i.e planting little clues in various places other than an official website to generate excitement.

I think ‘Lost’ did a similar thing when it was first released, but if you don’t want to spend hours wading though the characters myspace pages, weird japanese soft drink sites and translated manga comics - then this article seems to cover most stuff which has been going on behind the scenes!