I was privileged to be a part of the Future Tech 2010 Conference in Media City, Salford on Wednesday, surrounded by a broad cross-section of digital media and technology types, exploring the exciting new projects and initiatives launching across the North West over the next 12 months.
I was seriously impressed with the enthusiasm and vigour with which MIDAS (Manchester's regional development agency) and North West screen agency Vision+Media are generating a genuine buzz of excitement around technological and digital innovation, which puts efforts in the North East to shame.
For them, innovation is more than just a tired cliché, but something to be nurtured and encouraged from the provision of support for budding young entrepreneurs to a new wave of tech-savvy venture capitalists looking to put the risk back into British investment, and start competing with Silicon Valley for dominance over the European digital space.
A now overwhelming urge to relocate my business operation to Manchester aside, there is something else happening over in the west that I was keen to get my teeth into: Project Canvas. Since the BBC announced that they were moving their interactive and R&D departments (amongst others) from London to MediaCity in Salford Quays, there has been a flurry of interest in this area as a hub for progressive digital and technology enterprises of all sizes.
Representatives from the BBC's Project Canvas team gave a short demonstration of the platform, the new set-top box, and some of the interactive prototypes they have been working on over the last few months. It has to be said, that I was very excited at the prospect of finally seeing it in the flesh; The draft specifications are an interesting read, but nothing tells the story like a fully functioning user interface on a TV right in front of you.
Having seen it for real, it left me with more questions than answers, and far more than I could list here. I have a number of reservations around the user experience, the appropriateness of the television screen for some of the interactivity they described, and couldn't help but feel that the specification was being written around what they could do, rather than what they should. But that's what innovation is all about - exploration - so I'm remaining open minded for now.
The biggest disappointment for me, though, was the performance. I'm accustomed to browsing the web with a desktop, a MacBookPro or a modern games console - all of which are equipped with extremely powerful graphics chipsets capable of running high definition video content and animated user interfaces at once without dropping frames.
However, the set-top box used to demo Project Canvas obviously wasn't up to the task, and the frame-rate was unacceptably choppy. It reminded me of a super-charged 'red button' interface, which I'm sure we all remember before it was universally panned by brands and broadcasters as a useless gimmick.
Clearly, Canvas has a long way to go before it can meet the expectations of a speed-hungry web-browsing public, so we can't be too harsh on it right now - it's early days. But therein lies the problem; With the first Google-enabled Sony TV's and Logitech set-top boxes going on sale little more than a week from now, Project Canvas is in real danger of being left behind.
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