Since we’re researching ‘THE FUTURE’ we thought it would be nice to learn more about future technologies. The perfect place to learn more about these things is TNO. TNO is, as you might know, an applied science research organisation. They do a lot of research on different fields, like healthy living, industrial innovation, information society, etc. Yesterday we had the chance to talk to Rob Koenen, who is part of the media department placed under the information society theme. At TNO, Rob and a few of his colleagues showed us some great demos of a couple of projects they are working on.
We started with a demo of the FascinatE project (http://www.fascinate-project.eu/). In this demo we were given a tablet where you can see a panoramic video of a sport stadium. It was recorded in 4k, which offered a view that was really sharp, but when you zoomed in, it got even sharper. We could zoom in on every detail! We were surprised that it worked so good and so smooth. Later, we saw a demo which combined this idea with a smart TV. In this demo the view of the smart TV stayed the same but with the tablet in your hand you could zoom in on everything, change the angle, get more information, etc. While you use your iPad to zoom in on Lionel Messi, the rest of your family can just watch the regular match.
The next demo was an automatic generator of graphs of soccer matches. This program makes all sorts of graphs of the match so you can see different patterns when a team scores or when they are just running around the field. As a user, you can like certain moments, so the program can recognise moments like these in the graphs. You can now choose to get a summary/recap with all sorts of moments like these. This project was specially made for the amature soccer, because everything goes automatically.
Next up they wanted to show HbbTV to us. Unfortunately, the TV wasn’t really working with us (it was a monday..) so we didn’t see it. Rob did told us that he thought the HbbTV should be up and running on every channel with every cable company by 2015/2016.
After the demos we chatted and discussed some more about other technologies and trends with Rob. It was very nice to see and hear that most of our concepts are relevant. It’s nice to know we are on the right track! We are very thankful that we could visit TNO and the option to ask everything we wanted to know.
Until next time!
The future of TV