The Birmingham event brought together associate lecturers the Faculty of Mathematics, Computing and Technology (MCT), Health and Social Care, and Tessa Berg from Heriot-Watt University developed explored ideas of ‘ The Empty’ as a space for ‘offline’ life, and multisensory information presentation.

The next eSTEeM IBZL Phase 1 event will be in Bristol in February.

One outcome of the 1st and 2nd IBZL workshops in Manchester in May and October 2010, was the “Stealth Shepherd” idea. This was the notion of using physical avatars to represent individuals in a rural setting. The first two examples of this were an aerial  avatar for use by hill farmers (the Stealth Shepherd) and a remote tourist ground based avatar to represent individuals unable to get into the countryside.

Giraff on the farm

Cybermoor,a social enterprise, based in Alston, Cumbria, picked up this project and proposed a feasibility study to the Technology Strategy Board (TSB). This was successful and resulted in field trials of both avatars in Summer 2011. A final report has been produced for the TSB

The Giraff screen and its operator

Our initial investigations surprised us with the limited availability of devices suitable for our two functions. There are very few remote presence robots available suitable for the remote tourist role and while there are more remotely piloted aircraft available, costs are very high.

We chose the Giraff from Giraff Technologies AB as an example remote tourist and trialled it with excursions around Alston Town Hall. The Giraff was loaned to us by the Manufacturing Systems Research Group at Warwick University.

Blue Bear Systems Research provided us with their aerial avatars – a conventional fixed wing plane and a stable helicopter based platform. The aerial platforms were demonstrated to local farmers in July 2011. BBC Cumbria local news produced a report on the aerial avatar available at BBC Look North. The aerial avatars attracted a great deal of interest with farmers spotting applications spontaneously. Two initial applications are: use in search and rescue and in the management of livestock (the original Stealth Shepherd).

The helicopter avatar

The ground based avatar is likely to need a little more development. It needs ruggedising for outdoor use and is not really suitable for unaccompanied use.

Overall we learned a lot from the trials and we have the basis for future projects which are likely to result in the use of remote avatars in the countryside.

Consider if you will the likelihood of twenty intense intelligent people producing dynamism and insight in a hotel conference suite. Not likely? No .. you are probably right. The sterile atmosphere of the world’s 21^st Century hotel conference rooms is not the place where you would expect great ideas to emerge. Strange really, after all, presumably the hotel managers, Directors and architects thought that the facilities would offer all needed to produce solutions to the world’s problems (and thus justification for massive fees for hiring). Sadly, experience would tend to suggest that the free lunch and not the idea factory is the attraction.

Well, I have some news for the cynics. In a variety of hotels in a variety of places odd things are changing our outlooks on what is possible.

This is certainly not a sales piece, there is no intention to outline in luridly silly terms an ‘ubber experience’ of psychedelic magnitude. Nope. We did some workshops and we worked with some intelligent people and we treated them like intelligent people who could, if they so wished, think some pretty special things. If you want some kind of an idea of the ‘key’ to the IBZL Imagine events well how about these:

All who participate are equal

The facilitator is not the ‘big deal’

The process is low key and not ‘sold’

Dignity and thought are valued

There are no clichés and a lack of jargon

Simple is it not? But what comes from this ‘John Doe’ of an event? Well, and you must realise that I am biased .. after all, I came along with Imagine in the first place. Well, from my point of view this is what I see and experience. We live in a time drought. You just cannot get enough of the stuff. Weeks can pass and whole groups of thoughtful professionals cannot find a spare second to call their own. At an Imagine event we have stored up some time. Simple. The time we store is placed in a convenient room in a large hotel complex and, with an offer of a free supper and lunch tis true, guests come and grab the stuff. In the timey space we provide clever people talk to each other about the future of the internet. Even more provokingly, they consider what might just happen if internet latency reduced to vanishing point and bandwidth expanded to encompass .. well, just about everything. In such a strange, parallel universe what might happen? What kinds of strange and wonderful monsters and fairies would phfliitt into existence and what could we do with them?

That’s it. That’s all we do. The rest is just chat and splat. Laughter and furrowed brows. It can be fun and it certainly provokes some interesting reactions .. the main thing is, by the time we finish there is absolutely no time left in the room and we can all go home feeling full and fairly satisfied. 

Simon Bell

So far, we have run two ‘Phase 1′ workshops in Milton Keynes and Manchester (May and June 2011),  and a ‘Phase 2′ workshop (September 2011). We will be reporting here on the work in hand following these workshops shortly. We are also organising 3 workshops in other OU offices in Belfast and Birmingham (Dec 2011) and Bristol (Feb 2012), which we’ll be reporting on here in the next few weeks.

The reference for the paper is below, and it can be downloaded from the OU’s ORO repository.

Reference

Walker, Steve; Bell, Simon; Fensom, Shaun and Straughan, Keith (2011). The ‘Infinite Bandwidth, Zero Latency’ Project: inventing a digital future. In: IADIS International Conference: ICT, Society and
Human Beings, 24-26 July 2011, Rome.

‘Futurescaping Infinite Bandwidth, Zero Latency’, by Simon Bell and Steve Walker has now been published in the journal Futures at: doi:10.1016/j.futures.2011.01.011 (to find the paper, copy this doi: address into the search box at http://dx.doi.org/. The doi (Document Object Identifier) is a permanent identifier, unlike a URL.

The abstract is below.  Unfortunately, Futures is not an open access journal (though some might think this slightly ironic given the title…). You can request a copy of the paper via Open Research Online, the OU’s research repository.

Abstract

In the 1990s Castells analysed ‘the rise of the network society’ but this remains an ever-changing phenomenon. It throws up new concepts and issues. For example, no one foresaw what Mark Zuckerberg would create in terms of on-line social networks with the FaceBook project. Predicting the functionality and utility of the Internet is a mug’s game and yet it can be extremely profitable for those who ‘guess right’ and are able to influence the future applications and organisational forms of the network society.

Next Generation Access (NGA) broadband is promoted strongly by policy makers as underpinning future economic growth. NGA can be thought of as a potential future placeholder, the content and structure of which, while remaining tantalizing, is occupying many contemporary minds. In this paper we describe a process (Imagine/Triple Task Method) and an event structure IBZL (or Infinite Bandwidth Zero Latency), which explores potentially novel applications of NGA and provide some ideas as to the key components of the future inter-networked landscape.

In this paper we present the context of the IBZL initiative, review the ‘Imagine’ process as an effective method for ‘futurescaping’ and present some initial outcomes of the project.

The reports linked below give a sense of the structure and ideas that came out of these events.

• May 2010 workshop – Manchester
• Oct 2010 workshop – Manchester