The chapter is entitled Canadian Content, Public Broadcasting and the Internet: CBC’s Online Strategy 1995-2000, and “looks at CBC online innovation from 1995 to 2000, when despite major cutbacks in its own funding and radical changes in the structure of the Canadian Broadcast industry, the CBC determined that converged, multi-platform content provision was the best strategy for its long-term survival.”

The book can be ordered online at peterlang.com.

The AccessFabrik Lab team recently traveled to Amsterdam to attend IBC 2011 from September 8 – 13, the leading tradeshow for professionals working in the media and broadcasting industries. The lab represented Ryerson University, demoing our Flash Media IP-Based Video Switcher and New Tools for Collaborative Media Production. The work presented at IBC was exhibited to industry professionals and experts with the hopes to network and grow our current research potential.

IBC 2011 had a record breaking attendance of 50,462 this year and continues to draw a diverse crowd of spectators and exhibitors from over 160 countries. Over the the course of the week, IBC hosted live demos, onsite certified training, movie presentations and much more to showcase the best of the best in media production and technology.

The show was a great space to showcase Ryerson’s excellence as an innovator within the media production industry. The AccessFabrik Lab team is eager to see how the relationships established at the show will enhance existing projects, as well as enable opportunities for future research endeavours.

The AccessFabrik Lab team recently traveled to Las Vegas to attend the NAB Show from April 11th – 14th. Joining the team were Ryerson representatives from the Centre for Learning Technologies, Open Mobile DTV, and the Global Campus Network project. Our projects were exhibited on the show floor to industry leaders, researchers, practitioners, and hobbyists in the broadcasting and media industries looking to create interest and seek potential future collaborations.

The NAB Show is a gathering of media and entertainment professionals, with over 90,000 attendees this year. The show’s theme focuses on methods of content creation and making that content available to a wide audience on multiple platforms.

The lab presented our New Tools for Collaborative Media Production, as well as our newest project, the Flash Media IP Based Video Switcher. The video switcher was a collaborative pursuit between AF Lab’s Principal Investigator Michael Murphy, Brain Lesser and Arianne de Guzman from CCS, and Uwe Shulz from Hochschule der Medien in Stuttgart, Germany.

The lab is looking forward to pursuing the connections that were made at the show with the hope of establishing partners for future projects.

More information about Ryerson’s projects exhibited at the show can be found here. The posters that were featured at the show can be seen below.

Our Posters

AccessFabrik Lab: New Tools for Collaborative Media Production [PDF]

AccessFabrik Lab: Flash Media IP Based Video Switcher [PDF]

Other Ryerson Projects

Mobile ATSC Content Authoring System [PDF]

Enhanced Captioning [PDF]

Integrated Audio Description [PDF]

The Emoti-Chair [PDF]

Global Campus Network [PDF]

Murphy and Rankine attended all three days of sessions at the trade show, providing demonstrations of the AccessFabrik Lab’s remote desktop collaboration tools, which provide high definition, low-latency remote desktop streaming and control to machines potentially located anywhere across the globe. Murphy assumed control of a PC housed in the lab’s Toronto offices at Ryerson University, where he played high definition video and collaboratively edited video with lab representatives over 6000 kilometers away.

The conference served as an excellent networking environment, with numerous potential research collaborators and business partners finding interest in the lab’s technologies. The AccessFabrik Lab is excited to watch these relationships develop in the coming months.

AccessFabrik Lab associates Michael Dick and Elaine Wong received second place at this year’s OCE Discovery video competition, held at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre from May 17th – 18th. The competition served as a means to creatively present student research in an engaging and concise format.

The two used footage from their presentation at the 2010 NAB Show in Las Vegas, which they attended in April, providing information on the lab’s HD Collaborative Design Tools. The project allows users to participate in a high definition videoconferencing and shared-desktop environment, facilitating stronger business-to-business collaboration through a live translation captioning service, as well as the ability to manipulate designs on remote machines. The lab plans to integrate the project with other Semantic Web Services in the near future.

Michael Dick accepted the award on the second day of the conference, where he and Elaine Wong received $1,500 each.

The lab was also present at OCE in 2008 and 2009, each year continuing to innovate at the forefront of collaborative design.

AccessFabrik Lab Researchers at OCE Discovery 2008
Picture from left to right: Ron Rankine, Michael Dick, Sheldon Levy (Ryerson University President), Dr. Michael Murphy, Michael Lawrie, and Many Ayromlou

Featured in Ryerson Today

Earlier this spring (April 2010), Kathleen Webb – C3’s Project Director at Communitech Technology Association in Waterloo met with Abby Goodrum – Associate Dean of Research at Ryerson University – to discuss the possibility of merging the AF Lab’s USWS innovations with Southampton University’s MUPPITS project (aimed at developing an infrastructure for collaborative work through the adoption of tapeless workflows). Abby met the director at Southampton while Michael showed a group of visitors our facilities at Ryerson. Shortly after, the AF Lab researchers met Paul Walland – one of the leaders spearheading the MUPPITS project at the NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) conference during the week of April 12th in Las Vegas, where a trip to the UK to visit the MUPPITS partners in Southampton University’s IT Innovation Centre was agreed upon.

The trip took place on the week of May 17th. On the first day at the IT Innovation Centre, Michael and Ron met with Loraine Warren at the University of Southampton who talked to them about International Production Clusters which was a follow up to her previous meeting with Charles Davis (a researcher at Ryerson). The day concluded with an impressive presentation on the HD Collaborative Design Tools by the Ryerson Faculty. The next day consisted of a tour of BBC and their main television centre (Hammersmith), where BBC researchers displayed their current work with 3D. On the third day, Michael and Ron visited the Pinewood Studios where all digital assets gathered by the BBC are stored and disseminated. Pinewood is currently developing a data vault for archiving digital media. Ron looked at some equipment to do the digitization. The day concluded with a visit to Molinare, one of the premiere post-houses in Europe, responsible for editing content ingested by the BBC, as well as visiting Smoke & Mirrors (a MUPPITS partner also located in Soho).

Dr. Michael Murphy stayed an extra day to visit the Goldsmiths University where Dr. Marian F. Ursu – Reader in the Department of Computing, Goldsmiths University of London – gave him a tour of their work on collaborative storytelling. Overall the trip set the premise for some future collaboration between Ryerson and UK Universities interested in partnering with us for real-time collaboration. Ron Rankine describes this union as “applying synchronous structures to an asynchronous environment.”

The 5th international WEBIST (Web Information Systems and Technologies) conference brought together researchers, engineers and practitioners interested in real world applications and web-based information systems. According to the WEBIST website, this high standard conference only permits acceptance based on “quality, relevance and originality”.

Links: WEBIST 2009

An article published in Orion on January 2009, Ryerson lab experiments with next-generation videoconferencing, outlines Ryerson’s efforts in developing their project “New Tools for Collaborative Design and Communication” (also referred to as USWS, HD Collaborative Design Tools or CoMedia 2), which is an extension of the Access Grid open-source videoconferencing application.

Ryerson’s extensions on the Access Grid – with primary focus on the field of automotive engineering and manufacturing – provides high-definition visualization and remote desktop control. The technology in its entirety aims to create an interactive “shared space” environment that allows group-to-group communication and design. The project includes tools to provide real-time 3D design manipulation, captioning and translation in order to enable real-time interaction and reduce cultural barriers.

In partnership with Industrial partner Magna Closures Inc. and research partner Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Engineering of Germany, the research initiative aims to improve shared desktop environments, collaborative visualization and integrate semantic technology.

Future goals for this project include efficient ways to achieve automated captioning, voice recognition and translation.

Source: http://www.orion.on.ca/newsletter/jan09/ryerson.html

The demonstration detailed the lab’s work on shared spaced multimedia interaction, accomplished through a combination of remote desktop environments, videoconferencing, as well as live translation and captioning services among other things. The demo can be viewed here.

The team’s presentation, entitled “New Tools for Collaborative Design and Communication”, highlighted over a year’s worth of work on extending the Access Grid – an open-source videoconferencing and shared-space platform – to enable high-definition visualization and remote desktop control.

The focal point of their talk was a live demonstration of the new tools, which allowed those presenting in Burnaby to interact remotely with the remainder of the team in Toronto and jointly manipulate automotive designs in HD with minimal delay.

Dr. Michael Murphy, Principal Investigator, was pleased with the team’s success, noting “this award is particularly meaningful because it was given to us by our fellow colleagues in the Access Grid research community, with whom we’ve enjoyed a very positive collegial relationship for some time.”

The team plans to continue prototyping the technology while also seeking new opportunities to apply their work to other industrial sectors. They will also work to disseminate their research to academic and professional communities.

Established in 2004 to undertake research projects in the world of interactivity and multimedia design, the AccessFabrik Lab is housed in Ryerson’s Rogers Communications Centre, and is presently comprised of Dr. Murphy, Many Ayromlou, Michael Dick, Michael Lawrie, Ron Rankine and Elaine Wong. Former members include Maayan Cohen, Roshini Dominic and Robert King.

Funding for this project was provided by the Ontario Centre of Excellence for Communications and Information Technology and the Rogers Communications Centre.