Douglas Williams BT Innovate and Design doug.williams@bt.com

“An Englishman’s home”, they say, “is his castle”; meaning that an Englishman has the right to control who enters his home. The traditional castle used a drawbridge to control access, and when under attack, a castle could survive in siege mode, with the drawbridge up; but only for so long. The castle thrived, not when in siege mode, but with drawbridge down, with commerce and communication in full flow, with the easy transit of people and goods, ideas and inspiration in and out of the castle.  The future networked home may be similar.  Its occupants may survive, isolated; but they will thrive when easily connected to others. 

We need the safety of home; but to grow and to function effectively in society, we need to learn to operate outside our ‘castle’.  People need others to relate to, to learn from and with whom they can share.  People need to do this. People, not devices! The networked home of the future invokes images of home automation, of security cameras, of automatic curtains, turning on the oven before you get home, monitored power supplies, numerous high-definition screens showing blockbuster movies. That may be “cool”, but a key function of the future networked home must be facilitating connections between people. 

Together Anywhere, Together Anytime (TA2) is a 7^th Framework European research project that is addressing the duty and opportunity of enabling and supporting relationships between people in different households. TA2 is exploring how emerging technologies and standards may affect the way groups of people are able to communicate. TA2 seeks to support communication between groups, recognising that we often socialise as cohorts, families or teams and that current communications technology does not support well such group-to-group interactions. 

Figure 1: Family A enjoying multiple, natural interactions with families B and C. 

TA2 seeks to support communications in which people can see and hear each other and in which they can jointly participate in a common activity, be that sharing, learning or playing. These use cases, which have been described in detail in the project, include the joint authoring and sharing of user-generated content, children teaching each other dance moves, and families enjoying a board game. 

Figure 2: TA2 is building a prototype team-based collaborative game based on the board game “Space Alert”. 

All the concepts being investigated have been validated with potential users and are now being developed to operate on a shared technological platform.  This platform will support high-definition video capture of the groups of people at each end, but rather than simply transmitting a single wide-angle shot as in traditional video conferencing, the platform will use insights from film and TV production to automatically edit together, on the fly, the key elements of the interaction. This will include any shared media, game or score boards, together with the faces and gestures of those who are communicating. This is a suitably ambitious task, which requires a group of differently skilled people to work together towards a common goal. 

Figure 3: TA2 is building a prototype that enables people to create personalised videos, based on the contributions from multiple sources, that they can share with friends and family. 

Can you hear what I am saying?

When we communicate face to face, we use, the best, most immediate audio and video connection our ears and eyes can deal with. The sound quality is excellent, and our two ears provide positional as well as audio cues. Our eyes can scan the setting and can pick up on peripheral visual cues and bring them into focus.  But when we separate groups of people, placing networks and technology between them, we introduce delays and other imperfections in the audio-visual communication channel. TA2 is working on technical solutions for ultra-low delay audio and video that will provide surround sound to replicate the spatialisation of the sound. The project is also working on ways of automatically focusing in on the parts of an image that are most important, all in high definition. 

Conclusion

Enabling such rich mediated communication is ambitious, and noble. Linking our ‘castles’, or more precisely the people within them, is essential. The key to allowing castles to thrive was the drawbridge, not because it kept the enemy ‘out’, but because it allowed the castle to take a wider part in society. The key functionalities of the future networked home will not be the functionality that gives control within the home, but the functionality that allows people in one home to communicate with people in others. Enabling and supporting such relationships is both a duty and a business opportunity. We like building relationships, we invest time in such activity – and time, they say, is money. 

TA2 is a collaborative research project jointly funded under the European Union’s 7^th Framework Programme. For more information please visit: www.ta2-project.eu 

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