I'm Juliette Carter
Kristian Hentschel
Lawrence Pardoe
Jonathan Heathcote
Kristine Grivcova
James Gibson
Craig Wright
I've just finished my PhD in Computer Science at the
University of Manchester.
I've just graduated from the University of York
with Electronic Engineering and Music Technology Systems.
I've just completed a degree in Electrical
and Electronic Engineering at Newcastle University.
Prior to working for the BBC I worked
for a couple of years as a software engineer.
Prior to that I completed a degree
in Computer and Systems Engineering.
I graduated last year from the University of
Glasgow in Computer Science with quite
a lot of electronics options. Now I'm here at the BBC.
I've always been interested in media and production
and of course Computer Science and the BBC seems
to be a very creative place where lots of different
exciting things are going on.
I graduated a year ago from the University of York
where I studied Electronics and Music Technology.
Working here is a fantastic opportunity to work in a technical role
in something that has such a big impact like the BBC
and such a broad range of projects as well.
I've just completed a master's in
Electrical and Computer Engineering at
the University of York.
There are numerous reasons why I chose to work here.
I saw a lot of the demo projects that previous
trainees had done and I thought they were really creative.
So we've been working on a project to
combine a lot of the archive video
footage and television projects that the BBC has
and to explore this in virtual reality.
Essentially we're trying to connect BBC Redux
which is a kind of BBC Archive
to virtual reality and find new ways to explore this
archive in 3D space, really.
We're using the HTC Vive headset which is
a VR headset that comes with a couple of controllers
that allows you to put a person in 3D VR space
and allows them to then manipulate that space.
So we're taking an awful lot of metadata
from BBC Redux programmes and then processing that and displaying it
in a three-dimensional point cloud
We then allow a user to walk around that cloud
viewing those points and the programmes that they correspond to
select a couple and then watch them.
I've been working mainly on the video playback
so once a video has been selected from the
massive BBC archive
I've been tasked with displaying this video
on whatever screen we decide.
Unreal is a freely available platform that provides a
very intuitive way for building virtual
worlds for computer games or as in our case
virtual reality and then provides much functionality
for interfacing with different controller inputs such as
the HTC Vive headset and hand controllers.
So during this project I've been pulling lots of data
from BBC Redux and I've been looking at
interesting ways of visualizing the metadata
and how these programmes relate to each other.
In this project I've been working particularly on audio
so giving the player real-time feedback
on its position and its position relative
to other objects.
I've been providing visual effects for
user interactions. There has to be a user
interaction when the user touches a piece of media
so it'll generate a little cloud of sparks, I suppose.
Within this project I've been focusing on sound design
to create a more immersive experience for the user.
By the end of 2 weeks we're hoping to have a fully
functioning demo to show to the other staff members.
The end goal of this project isn't to have a finished product
that will be user facing. It's more to explore the ideas
that VR gives us, the sort of new user interface paradigms
that you can show people.