The Engineer: The 2011 Shortlist - Consumer Products

The Engineer, 7 november 2011.

Read the article here:  The 2011 Shortlist - Consumer Products

Excerpt:

"FASCINATE
Salford University, Technicolour, BBC R&D, Fraunhofer HHI, Alcatel-Lucent, TNO
Sport, theatre and music lovers could soon be in for a new level of immersive interaction with live events, with a broadcast technology pioneered by researchers at Salford University and several commercial partners.

FascinatE is a system that allows viewers to interactively view and navigate around an ultra-high-resolution video panorama showing a live event, with the accompanying audio automatically changing to match the selected view.

The output will be adapted to a particular kind of device, covering anything from a mobile handset to an immersive panoramic display. At the production side, this requires the development of new audioand video-capture systems, and scripting systems to control the shot-framing ptions
presented to the viewer.

The nature of the project – an end-toend broadcast system – requires extremely close collaboration between all partners.

Thus, the university is working with Technicolor (Germany) on audio capture, audio reproduction and common audio software development; the BBC R&D division, Fraunhofer HHI (Germany) and Arri (Germany) on video-capture, stitching and rendering; Alcatel-Lucent (Belgium) and TNO (Holland) on delivery network architecture and streaming mechanisms; and the Interactive Institute (Sweden) and the Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya (Spain) on usability and development of user interfaces so that the system can be realisedas a consumer product.

The first test shoot involved the capture of a Premier League football match in October 2010 and considerable interest was shown by the broadcast industry in making the project outcomes a reality."