In the round: getting the BBC in 360

How new cameras, production techniques and technology are putting viewers right in the picture at the BBC. 

The most disruptive technology we have seen for a generation" is how the BBC BlueRoom team described Virtual Reality and 360 degree video when they reported back from the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas last January. 

It's important to distinguish between VR and 360 video. While the gaming industry is excited about VR - which puts you 'inside' an artificial environment - broadcasters are waking up to the idea that viewers can also be put in the middle of the action of real action on film, via 360 degree video.  

Viewed on a headset, you can feel in the same situation as the camera. But even on a flat screen, 360 video provides a new way of interacting with an event; you can scroll around to see different aspects of what's been filmed. You just need to look at YouTube to see some examples of what's out there.

BBC Television sees 360 video (as opposed to VR) as an imminent area of strategic interest. The BlueRoom's report says that "the technology is now sufficiently mature that the BBC needs to give active consideration to which genres and programme types could benefit from 360, and which would not". 

The work has begun, as you can see at the test platform BBC Taster. Most notably, you can find yourself on the Strictly dancefloor, or diving with whales with the Natural History Unit's team.

Zillah Watson, Editor BBC R&D, has been busy advising journalists keen to give 360 a go. Check out the BBC News Labs site for the first film from last June from the migrant 'jungle' camp in Calais, and a tour of Westminster. 

"The composition of the shot brings up different questions each time you go to cover a story" she says. "If it gives the viewer a better sense of the location and the space, then for a news story it could really enhance the narrative."   

Even Radio is getting in on the act. At Radio 1Xtra, the Radio Visualisation team thought there could be a ready audience for the new technology among their typically youthful and diverse audience. The "rap battle" they filmed in the round, Fire in the Booth, has so far clocked 400 thousand views. [Beware the strong language in this clip.] 

Head of Technology for Radio, Paul Morgan, says there are many lessons still to be learned. "The basic set-up is six GoPro cameras on a tripod, and 'sticher' software to run the images together . It works pretty well, but it's best not to have too much action at a 'join' and lighting is key". 

Paul sees the next step as working out how to improve sound, to get it coming from the right place, wherever you turn. Expect to hear more about binaural audio, which locates the sound more realistically 'external' to you rather than in the ear, and object-based audio "which will be massive for Radio in the next few years anyway". 

The editorial questions raised by VR are only just beginning. How much should we guide the viewer? What material works better? 

"We have to keep an open mind about how the audience will react and how interactive people expect the experience to be" says Paul Morgan. "We could just place a camera in the middle of a talk studio so you can see people's reactions as well as the speaker, but will the off-stage business just be distracting?"

"Workflow tools are developing fast in the 360 space too." says Andy Corp of BBC Engineering, TV. "Manufacturers are moving quickly to develop the tools needed to stitch, manipulate and get the most of 360 cameras. For high-end 360 productions it may still be necessary to use specialist graphics software and operators, but it's increasingly feasible for a self-op producer to create 360 content which is of a good standard."  

Incorporating 360 video into the production chain isn't going to happen overnight, but it's going to be a fascinating journey.

Concert Review: Merry Opera Messiah

On the evening of Saturday 9^th April, a girl dressed in a grey hoodie slouched into the church and scowled at the people she saw. Some them she probably already knew, but she didn’t care for any of them. They included a nervous and nerdy young man, an aggressive yuppie, a young widow, a rather prudish woman and seven others. One of the men picked up a score of Handel’s Messiah that he found, and started to sing.

This was the start of the Merry Opera Company’s performance of Messiah, a staged version produced by John Ramster, which came to King Charles as part of a tour that also took them to the University Church in Oxford, St James Piccadilly and other churches around England this spring. And it was astonishing. In the course of the evening, we watched the characters, all played by professional opera singers, interact with each other as they sang and listened, walked around the church, and shared out the solos and choruses, sometimes with two or more singers exchanging phrases in the same aria. Through their gestures and action they expressed their individual stories, and they all changed through the evening, shrugging off their various inner demons to become a united group which absolutely thundered out the final chorus.

This was a wonderful and moving performance, which without any of the acting would still have been magnificent. But watching the music brought to life in individual and very human emotions took it to a new level. The organ provided all of the accompaniment and was played supremely well by the virtuoso Chad Kelly. There were tears in the audience and a standing ovation at the end.

Performed at the Church of King Charles the Martyr, Tunbridge Wells

Coleridge and the patriotism of the English Romantics

Notes after reading the excellent biography of Coleridge by Richard Holmes.

In his forties, when he was settling down after a fraught and often misunderstood life, Coleridge wrote about his youthful pantheistic beliefs in a beautiful sonnet, ‘To Nature’:

It may indeed by phantasy, when I
Essay to draw from all created things
Deep, heartfelt, inward joy that closely clings;
And trace in leaves and flowers that round me lie
Lessons of love and earnest piety.
So let it be; and if the wide world rings
In mock of this belief, it brings
Not fear, nor grief, nor vain perplexity.
So will I build my altar in the fields,
And the blue sky my fretted dome shall be,
And the sweet fragrance that the wild flower yields
Shall be the incense I will yield to Thee,
Thee only God! And thou shalt not despise
Even me, the priest of this poor sacrifice.

He was known as a great metaphysical writer. To his contemporaries, this generally meant that he was incomprehensible, for which he was mocked cruelly by Hazlitt and others in the press, as he recognises in the poem. What he tried to do in his writing, however, was to make sense of the new Romantic movement that he played a part in during his collaboration with Wordsworth twenty years earlier, in the context of the rise also of science.

He was criticised variously for being too radical and for not being radical enough (potent accusations in the turbulent years of the Napoleonic Wars and the economically depressed years afterwards in England that led to the Great Reform Bill of 1831), because he was ambitious for change without revolution. He wanted to promote a better society based on better education and better moral understanding; a society where industrialisation (then booming) would be humane and not merely rational and profit-seeking. However, he shied away from party politics, and taught that an proper understanding of history, philosophy and literature (epitomised in Shakespeare, who, in his view, captured the human soul) would make men not only ‘civilised’ but also ‘cultivated’, and this cultivation entailed for him a sense of one’s place and duty to one’s fellow men and to God.

Significantly, then, he was tenaciously religious. It might seem to modern readers that radical thinkers after the Enlightenment can hardly have avoided scepticism, but Coleridge was quite typical of his time in expressing a ‘common-sense’ and one might say ‘grounded’ idea of the importance of theology and belief in God, partly as a deliberately patriotic, anti-French sentiment. As they saw it, the French Revolution, and all the chaos and disaster that followed was, after all, a result of rampant empiricism which elevated man’s rational nature above his moral being. One of the reasons that Shakespeare became so popular for the Romantics was the fact that his imagination was so unconstrained and so very ‘un-French’.

The Romantic celebration of nature as something morally empowered, which had its origins in the ‘Gothic’ eighteenth century, was driven in large part by this patriotism, as well as by a reaction against the ‘dark, satanic mills of the industrial revolution. (Coleridge met the ageing and impoverished William Blake once and was moved by the experience.) But it was also a quasi-scientific attempt to identify what ‘was’ the Imagination – could it be defined and described, and how far could it be exercised? Somehow, it seemed to open the way to an understanding of the soul and what the meaning of man could be, especially in relation to the world he found himself in and was so dramatically shaping.

Fear, greed and inertia

I've often heard it said that our aversion to change is something instinctive, even natural.

Our brains have evolved from those of more primitive animals who needed most of all to detect threats in order to survive. Now, we use them creatively, proactively; but vestiges remain of the basic defensive mechanisms.

A quick Google search comes up with, for example, this article, "Accommodating new behaviours".

Even when our basic needs or instincts don't over-ride pure intellectual decision-making, they are always there in the background, as part of our thinking.

It's not worth over-doing, but as a very quick check that a communication will be acted on, I've found myself asking "fear or greed?" At the most basic level, every message appeals to one or both - what is there to gain or lose? It's the "what's in it for me?" test.

Am I being a bit hard on people? What about curiosity, loyalty, or a desire to help? Don't people respond to messages in these ways?

I think the answer is 'yes, but not as much'. And let's chuck in another one: laziness.

But communicators know that inertia is just as useful a guide to building campaigns as fear or greed: make the message as easy as possible to consume; publish it at point of use so it's less of a problem if they forget it; wrap it up with other messages or into a story so it's more memorable; or make it the default option and just say they have the option of changing.

I have to admit, I'm just as lazy, fearful and greedy as the next person. But at least that means I have a ready-made subject on which to test any communication - myself.

Light, music and theology

Extracted from my programme notes

It was inevitable that Dante would describe his journey through Paradise to a vision of the Trinity in terms of light and harmony. Classical philosophy had been interpreted from a Christian point of view in increasing detail for hundreds of years by the fifteenth century, most significantly by the teaching of Boethius and St Augustine. It was a commonplace understanding that heavenly perfection was characterised by the purity of mathematical proportion and luminosity. So Dante’s Paradise is flooded with light, the light that emanates from the highest heaven, is dimly perceptible even on earth, and gains intensity the nearer it is to its source. "La luce divina e penetrante per l’universo secundo ch’e degno" (Paradise XXXI:22) - the divine light penetrates the universe according to degree.

Light was therefore seen as the most noble of natural phenomena because it gave an insight into the perfection of the cosmos. Similarly, proportion, or concordance, was considered to be the loftiest aesthetic principle in the arts and architecture. And in music, the beauty (or the truth) of a work was determined by its use of the mathematically purest intervals - the octave, the fifth and the fourth. Thus, in his De Musica, St Augustine argues that music properly understood is a science, as opposed to the "art" of unintellectual, vulgar performances.

Hence also the enthusiasm Medieval thinkers had for the Pythagorean idea of the music of the spheres. Consonance in music signified perfection, the celestial harmony, and each of the planetary spheres sung its own note as it revolved around the earth. Light and the unison in music were the essence of true beauty, as they fulfilled man’s longing for the ultimate concord, the reconciliation of the multiple into one.

Other people do

Apparently, if you ask someone in a survey about what they intend to do,  they are then more likely to do it.

The most-quoted example of this "mere-measurement effect" is canvassing for elections, which has been shown to increase the chance of people taking the trouble to vote by 25%. (Nudge: Improving Decisions and Health, Wealth and Happiness by Thaler and Sunstein)

This is a form of 'Nudge'.

I love Nudge Theory because it's so simple and has so many applications. It's also all about human behaviour. We all tend to be susceptible to suggestion and we just love to belong to something.

So when we want staff to fill in a survey, yes it's a good idea to ask nicely, and it helps to say what will be done with the responses. But it's also very powerful just to show that other people are filling it in. Other people are doing this, you are saying, so it's not such a risk.

That's the reason for those odd road signs urging you to "take your little home" simply because "other people do". I'm not sure this really works, as it still sounds preachy, but it might just be better than the blunt instruction "Keep Britain Tidy", which doesn't appeal to me on quite the same level.

So part of encouraging people to do something can involve establishing a norm, or the appearance of a norm. Yet it's really important to give people choice and to be honest with them. Promoting an option as a default, so people have to make an effort (however small) to do anything else, is obviously very powerful, but it can easily be misused. Think of all the pre-selected check boxes in online forms which you have to deselect to stop yourself being sent promotional material.

New Year, self-help and a tiny bit of philosophy

It's that time between Christmas and Valentine's Day when the media are full of New Year Resolution campaigns. My favourite is the "Turn over a new leaf" campaign for Clipper Teas. And I liked this excellent summary of Emotional Intelligence by Travis Bradberry, which popped up on LinkedIn again.

But I'm quickly getting bored by all the self-help advice.

We're very familiar with life-style advice that talks of making the most of the present moment in order to maximise our potential.  Concepts such as Mindfulness or Emotional Intelligence echo what Classical philosophers such as the Stoics taught about living 'in the moment'.  Here is Seneca on the subject: "Begin at once to live, and count each separate day as a separate life. He who has thus prepared himself, he whose daily life has been a rounded whole, is easy in his mind"

But ancient philosophy (like, I suppose, the more transcendental religious traditions) teaches the importance of self-improvement without much reference to the people around us. Nowadays, looking at how much we seek validation by our social media habits, our happiness is probably far more reliant on what others think of us.