Equator – record and reuse workshop

February 12-13, UCL, London

Begin: Coffee and registration, 10:30, Technical program 11:00, Thursday 12^th Feb

End: 15:00 Friday 13^th February

Several Equator experience projects have explored the idea of recording participants’ actions and then reusing them later on in some way:

· · the City project involved the idea that the current experience might adapt to previous participants’ experiences, specifically that recommendations for content would take account of others’ trails through the experience.

· · the Ambient Wood project included the Den interface where children were able to reflect on their experience in the wood as part of the learning process.

· · the Citywide project created deployed some installations in which members of the public were able to explore 3D recordings of previous live games, following different avatars – runners and online players – around the virtual city as they played Can You See Me Now.

Other projects have analysed logged material as part of the research process, making use of logging facilities within platforms such as Equip and Elvin. Finally, some Equator partners are developing techniques to analyse logged activity – for example Southampton’s work on recording and analysing meetings.

A proposal is now emerging to explore the deeper infrastructure issues involved in ‘record and reuse’ leading to the development of new Equator mechanisms and tools. This might address issues such as:

· · agreeing common formats for ‘recordings’ of activity

· · extending our current distributed data models to support access to recorded as well as current data and to support the mixing of recorded and live data as part of an experience

· · tools for analysing and tagging recorded data

· · tools for cross-indexing different kinds of recorded data (e.g., synchronising and cross-linking recorded event-streams with time-based media such as audio and video)

· · tools for reviewing, editing and compositing recordings and then exporting them into other packages for post-production

· · requirements for an approaches to storing recorded information

· · implications for recommender and context-awareness services

The ultimate aim of this work would be to define and then implement a powerful and flexible set of services and tools to support all aspects of recording mixed reality activities and then reusing the recorded material in other activities.

The aim of the workshop will be to explore the relevant background and to establish the core research challenges to be addressed in moving forward. The workshop will last for two full days and will involve a mixture of formal presentations of pre-submitted position papers and informal discussion and brainstorming sessions. In the first instance, the papers will be published internally on the Equator website.