Education

Because the [itvt] editorial team is busy working on The TV of Tomorrow Show (March 3rd-4th in San Francisco) and on our new EBIF Intensive event (March 5th in San Francisco), we will be covering most stories in summary/round-up form over the next few weeks. Here is a round-up of recent news in various categories:

Because the [itvt] editorial team is busy working on The TV of Tomorrow Show (March 3rd-4th in San Francisco) and on our new, post-TVOT EBIF Intensive event (March 5th in San Francisco), we are covering a number of stories in this issue in summary form:

In a posting on the BBC Internet blog, Monday, BBC Future Media & Technology's head of user experience and accessibility, Jonathan Hassell, announced the launch of Us5, a series of interactive online videos that have been created "by, for and with" people with learning difficulties/developmental disabilities, in order to "help them think through one of the biggest issues affecting them at the moment--the opening up of more choices to them resulting from the government's move to direct payments, individual budgets and self-directed support. People with learning difficulties have never before been so able to choose for themselves how they live their lives and what they want to do," Hassell's blog posting continued.

The American Film Institute Digital Content Lab, an organization which for more than a decade has played a key role in fostering the development of interactive and multiplatform TV--and interactive media in general--in the US, will hold its annual interactive media showcase, the AFI DigiFest (formerly known as the AFI Digital Content Festival), at the Mann Chinese Theater (auditorium #1) in Hollywood, November 4th and 5th.

[itvt] would like to alert our readers to two videos that were recently posted to YouTube by Will Kreth, senior director of advanced video strategy at Time Warner Cable and founder of OEDN.net (note: the name is an acronym for "OCAP/EBIF Developer Network), an organization which is attempting to drive application development efforts using the US cable industry's OCAP/tru2way and EBIF middleware standards and whose backers include Time Warner Cable, Cablevision, Charter and Bright House.

At the SIGGRAPH event in New Orleans this week, a team of researchers from the University of Tokyo is demo'ing a technology, dubbed the Airborne Ultrasound Tactile Display, that uses ultrasound technology to enable touchable holograms. "Although we can 'see' holographic images as if they are really floating in front of us, we cannot 'touch' them, because they are nothing but light," the team explains on SIGGRAPH's Web site. "This project adds tactile feedback to the hovering image in 3D free space. Tactile sensation requires contact with objects, but including a stimulator in the work space dilutes the appearance of holographic images.

ICT Results, an editorial service created by the European Commission to showcase European Union-funded research in information and communications technology (ICT), published a report, Wednesday, on an EU-funded project called Enhanced Learning Unlimited (ELU), that was established to develop methodologies and tools for enabling learning via interactive TV ("t-learning").