We have asked all the project partners, (Watershed, Calvium, Historic Royal Palaces, Bristol Old Vic and Bristol City Council) to share their motivations, expectations and challenges in relation to this project.<--break->

Watershed


Motivations
Watershed is a cross-artform producer, sharing, developing and showcasing exemplary cultural ideas and talent.
As a producer of inspirational cultural experiences and a pathfinder to future cultural experiences, Watershed takes an open innovation approach to talent development, working at the intersection of creative and computing sectors to produce projects where artists and arts organisations work collaboratively with digital technologists to develop talent to explore new genres and experiences.
Building on Bristol's successful record of technology-inspired open innovation, this project is designed to give Watershed’s network (particularly through the Pervasive Media Studio) hands-on exposure to leading edge pervasive computing technology, to lower the barriers to participation and catalyse the rapid deployment of: context-aware technologies, delivery channels and business opportunities. The mix of content creators and producers, attraction owners and technologists allows Watershed to further develop its processes and methodologies of collaborative research and through the public tests and trials we will look to uncover new models of public engagement.

Expectations
At the end of this project we expect to know the different ways in which Watershed’s extended creative community can find ongoing social, cultural and/or financial value from using the software/toolkit within their work/practise.

Success
Advances in technology are opening up opportunities in Heritage & Tourism, Gaming, Education, Broadcast Media, Retail, Advertising, Marketing and Communications. Facilities to enable early exploration and community growth are of increasing importance but no one organisation has the bandwidth to create communities of expertise across sectors. Success for Watershed in this project is the production of three successful exemplars and the wide sharing of knowledge around them to accelerate the development of the skill base within our extended creative community. At the end of the project we hope that the toolkit is being used by a range of individuals and organisations (including an ongoing use by the exemplar partners) who have growing familiarity with the technologies and an understanding of experience design.

Challenges
Communication – with so many partners (all busy organisations with finite resources) a commitment to clear and regular communication from all is vital. I also hope that because mscape (a similar toolkit used by many of the collaborators) was so well established and documented, we don’t forget to interrogate the experience design and user engagement of this new service.

Delivery
Watershed seeks to involve audiences from across all areas of its activity in the collaborative research. Watershed’s audiences (both the creative community and the ‘public’) will want early access to the tools and the exemplar trials, to know that Watershed is involved in a cutting-edge project and to be able to feed back their thoughts and ideas into the process.

Calvium


Motivations
Calvium is a start-up formed out of the closure of Hewlett-Packard's Pervasive Computing Lab in November 2009. It has six employees working to the on-line delivery of authoring and delivery services. Building on research experience at Hewlett-Packard the team are exploring the design an technology requirements to enable context-based mobile applications to be authored by people with little or no programming experience. The 'Creating new markets for digital content' grant from the TSB is providing financial and collaborative support for our startup to engage in R&D in this early phase of the company's activities. The matched funding from the TSB enables the team to work with potential customers to build prototype authoring and delivery services and to use these to build exemplar applications.


Expectations, Delivery and success
Working with Historic Royal Palaces, Bristol Old Vic and The New Museum of Bristol we will create applications that use location as the primary context to deliver experiences for visitors to the Tower of London, the Old Vic theatre and the museum. These experience will be delivered on either iPhones or Android-based phones. To do this we will explore the technology for both indoor and outdoor location sensing and the design of experiences that work in the these heritage environments. Our partners will learn about experience design and the capabilities and potential for digital delivery. Calvium will learn about the requirements for providing a business delivering authoring and delivery services to this target market of creative people.


Challenges
The challenges for the Calvium in the project are: to go beyond the simple and limited authoring tools that are available currently; to extend the range of media experiences that can be created by media professionals and enthusiasts; to create a model that fosters ubiquity of use whilst respecting media ownership; delivering easily built yet rich context-based media experiences delivered in pervasive mobile devices. This project will enable us to landscape the details of these challenges and to test some of our hypotheses by collaborating with potential partners, customers and end consumers by building prototype solutions. Another possible challenge is (as with all research projects) that the technology approach we have adopted falls short of our ambition and the expectations of our potential customers. Of course as it is research, if our hypotheses prove correct it will speed up our time to business. If not it will delay our market entry as we adapt to take on board the valuable lessons from the project.

Historic Royal Palaces


Motivations
HRP’s Cause: “Our challenge is to help everyone explore the story of how monarchs and people have shaped society, in some of the greatest palaces ever built.” Exploration is a key concept for us and putting visitors in charge of their experience and giving them the tools to explore and discover our sites in their own way is a key goal. The design of the Escape from the Tower pilot puts visitors in the story, making decisions and behaving as active players rather than passive consumers of traditionally delivered historical content. We want visitors to emotionally engage through empathy, making connections with the past. They will be able to experience history where it happened, walking in the footsteps of some of our most famous prisoners and actively making the choices that allowed them to make their daring escapes from the Tower. Making visitors active participants in, rather than passive consumers of, content is our aim.
We use a wide variety of media to interpret the stories of our palaces – from room re-creations, to live interpretation to AV and audio. New technology appeals to us in so far as it can enable us to deliver the Cause – we’re not pursuing technology for its own sake but we are keen to use it if it can help us to deliver innovative visitor experiences. The idea of layering experiences over the physical site using virtual media could be particularly attractive for us as it removes the need for physical intervention in the historic fabric of the building, something that we are always keen to avoid.
Finally, we are keen to explore the idea of visitors accessing content on their own devices. HRP receives no public funding and investing money in large numbers of audio tour devices is not really where we want to be spending cash that could be better directed to creating innovative content. If, over time, we can migrate our visitors from old-fashioned audio tour devices on to their own multimedia devices which they bring to site, then we will free up capital to invest in new interpretation.


Expectations
At the end of this project we are expecting an evaluation of the visitor experience and its impact, an understanding of who uses it and what they get out of it and an understanding of how we might use the toolkit in the future to deliver content across our sites.

Success
For us, success would be visitors talking enthusiastically in the first person about their experience – “I helped XYZ escape”. Our aim with interpretation is to achieve profound immersion in our stories, a willing suspension of disbelief. JRR Tolkien says that a storyteller is successful if “he makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is ‘true’. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief arises the spell is broken… or rather the art has failed. You are then out in the Primary World again, looking at the little abortive Secondary World from outside”. We want to achieve a true integration of the virtual experience and the physical site so visitors are transported back in time, into the story.
We’re also interested in whether an iPhone app could potentially attract new audiences to our sites and would like to get good PR value out of the project.


Challenges
Time! We are repurposing existing content, however, this content was produced very cheaply for a small invited participant trial. Any content that is going to be delivered to the wider public will have to meet the high standards HRP would expect of anything we deliver either on site or off site via the web. All content will have to be tweaked and re-recorded to meet these standards and managing this process will take time. We need to ensure that we don’t miss important opportunities to improve the experience design in a rush to get the content upgraded and ready. GPS reliability – equality of experience is important to our visitors. If one family member’s GPS fixes differently from another’s then this can create a jarring and irritating experience for the whole family as we saw in our previous trial.

Delivery
We aim to deliver a high quality immersive experience with historically accurate but entertaining content and an equal experience for all participants.

 

Bristol Old Vic

Motivations
Bristol Old Vic is involved because it is interesting to collaborate with other organisations, share ideas and experiences with pervasive media. The technology will be able to deliver and enhance this project in an exciting way and may, in fact be able to define the language of our pilot project.

Expectations
At the end of this project we expect to have an accessible archive of memories of the Bristol Old Vic with the capacity to build on these memories, to continue to form a living legacy that will grow as time goes on. To be able to share these memories with the theatre's audience and to make the memories as site specific as possible.

Success
For us, success would be a fabulous installation all over the Bristol Old Vic, which lasts, grows and evolves over the next 200 years.

Challenges
The challenge for us is being very specific with the technology, to move beyond the traditional audio tour model.

Delivery
We are aiming to deliver an entertaining, informative and easy to use experience that will give people access to all areas of the building and to be able to make their own contribution to the experience.

Bristol City Council - M Shed

Motivations

M Shed is an exciting and innovative new museum for Bristol due to open in spring 2011. It will tell the story of the city. The 1950s transit shed (which was originally called M Shed) on Bristol’s historic harbourside is currently being transformed into the new museum. Thought-provoking and fun, M Shed will challenge the perceptions of what it has meant to live in Bristol over the centuries through the recollections of the people who shaped the city.

M Shed will explore Bristol’s history from prehistoric times to the 21st century. Stories about the city and its people have been discovered through working with experts and communities across Bristol – a process that will continue for the life of the museum. Rich collections of objects, archives and art will also play a vital part in bringing those stories to life. There will also be working exhibits on the harbourside including steamboats, trains and cranes.

M Shed will be a new kind of museum, one that challenges traditional ideas. It will work with the people of Bristol to create displays which everyone will want to come and see. It will be a living museum, where the stories of the past will spark discussions about the future and all visitors will be encouraged to play a part by donating their own memories and objects.

Expectations
As a result of this project we are looking to extend the experience of visitors to M Shed by delivering content beyond the walls of the new museum out into the city itself.   

Success
For visitors we want to end up with a fantastic, immersive and entertaining experience. For the museum we want to have developed new competencies and an understanding of how visitors in the future may want to author and interact with our collections and our city.

Challenges

Our biggest challenge is to successfully develop the pilot at the same time as we are reaching a critical phase in the delivery of the new museum.

Delivery
We want to produce a new type of visitor experience and have a model that can be rolled out to deliver content across all the city’s museums.