Communications Media

Aspiring rock stars can now create their own guitar solos, without ever having to play a real instrument, thanks the Virtual Air Guitar, developed at the Helsinki University of Technology.

The Virtual Air Guitar uses a computer to monitor the hand movements of a air guitar player and adds genuine guitar sounds to match player’s finger work. The innovative application combines gesture recognition with musical interpretation software.

The idea emerged at the Helsink

If only Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers were around today to take a spin with new technology being developed and tested by a team of computer scientists in Illinois and California.

If they were, they’d be dancing circles around each other – only from a considerable distance. That’s the beauty of Tele-immersive Environments for EVErybody, or TEEVE, a system that’s being test-driven simultaneously across thousands of miles this spring in the labs of Klara Nahrstedt, a computer sci

European researchers hope to take news agencies into the internet age by commercialising a platform of integrated Web services that can automatically classify, annotate and analyse news stories.

It will mean stories can be defined, on the fly, with a precision greater than a library’s card catalogue.

The News Engine Web Services (NEWS) platform is aimed at news agencies, governments and large enterprises and will enable them to develop highly advanced analysis to r

The University of Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) has launched the first video podcast news service from a UK university.

The School, which carries out world-leading research in multimedia and mobile communications, unveiled the first editions of ECS News this month. The programme is available on the School’s web site (www.ecs.soton.ac.uk), and can be downloaded either to be viewed on a portable device (such as an i-Pod video), or a laptop

This document has just been released by the PerX Project (a project funded by JISC, as part of the UK Digital Repositories Programme).

It is an advocacy document, aimed at content providers of various kinds (for example – journal publishers, professional societies and database providers and owners) who may have descriptive data (metadata) available for the actual content they produce. It introduces the various benefits of sharing metadata, in standardised and reusable ways, with

Multimedia providers and distributors are being sought by Leeds researchers, to test some of the latest technology for handling digital media such as music, games and TV.

In today’s digital world, multimedia entertainment reaches us in a huge variety of ways, whether it’s films watched on a laptop, interactive games on our mobile phones or music downloaded through the internet. As technology advances, these outlets proliferate, raising problems of compatibility and copyright prote