I recorded 3 episodes yesterday, and have another 2 to do on Friday. I really enjoy working on voice over projects as its so much fun.

MSc Digital Futures
(now incorporated into MSc Digital Art and Technology)

The year I studied for my Masters was an incredibly busy year but a very successful one. At the same time as doing the course, along with three other students from my first degree course, I set up my own digital production company which has gone from strength to strength winning lots of awards.

The company recently won its first major international award for the Weller Astronomy Galleries installation at the Royal Observatory, beating off competition from thousands of other companies from 25 countries.

HMC Interactive creates interactive multimedia products for a wide range of industries, including Chocolate Rain for Cadbury and Digital Grass for the BBC. Our latest project has been to create interactive experiences for the visitor centre at Torquay’s Living Coasts. These include a touch screen penguin training facility which allows people to nurture, grow and teach penguins a survival skill.

The Masters course helped me to be daring and risk taking, giving me confidence to believe in my own creativity. In my work with HMC Interactive, our clients always ask us for impossible things that don’t exist, and yet we find a way of making that fantasy a reality. It really is the most interesting job in the world.

“It really is the most interesting job in the world”

I am designing it to incorporate light and interaction at every level. It will not simply give off light, but play with it and react to it. The end result will feature over 30 miniature screens and hundreds of lazer beams to create a truly unique light work.

All the concept art is being finished today and we begin production this afternoon. The first phase of the warehouse will have several beautiful interactive sculptural elements, like the above image by Anais Van Delft

I will also be looking to create an interactive reception room piece, but I’ll give you more details on that later.

Yesterday Professor Yang and his team from Imperial College kindly offered to show me around the robotic facility and demonstrate some of his latest research projects. I was guided around the amazing Institute of Biomedical Engineering near South Kensington.

It was absolutely fascinating to be allowed to play with state of the art medical robotic technology, and the work Professor Yang and his team are doing is truly mind blowing. Firstly, her showed me a robot-surgery machine that allowed you to use 3D vision to manipulate medical tools in a very easy to use way. The robots responded to your finger movements very smoothly, and it was a truly unique experience to play with this sort of technology.

He also showed me a “cufflink” sized chip that was fully wifi enabled, and was able to detect the motions of your inner ear, sensing balance and transmitting it wirelessly. Not only does this have amazing medical potetial to detect bone, joint and balance problems, but it could also be integrated into hearing aids to detect a fall or trip. This would be a fantastic “first alert” service to the elderly and those with mobility problems.

Also I was pleased to see that Professor Yang’s team had a good sense of humour and had re-programmed their amazing tiny microchip for some really fun gaming experiences. They had created a sort of “snowboarding” type 3D game where you must shift your balance to control the characters on screen down an icy hill. It was such smooth interaction. I expect that we will see more of this kind of subtle wifi interaction in the future.

It was nice to hear Professor Yang talk about “pervasive computing” from a medical perspective, as this will have huge impact on peoples lives.