We will all soon be able to watch what we want on our televisions, when we want thanks to a project funded with the help of six million euros from the Information Society Technologies area of the EU’s Framework Programme.

Building on the communication technologies developed and improved in recent years, ‘Share it!’ developed an end-to-end system that provides seamless access to on-line, broadcast and personally stored content. It allows easy access and transfer of the content bet

No matter which channel you turn to on television, you are likely to find some kind of visual element that seems to overpower the screen — making it difficult to focus on one thing.

In the past few years, television stations have begun to reformat their screen presentations to include scrolling screens, sports scores, stock prices and current weather news. These visual elements are all designed to give viewers what they want when they want it.

However, Kansas State Univ

A recently started EU project is pushing for a better integration of research programmes on mobile communications in Europe. Under the project name ALIPRO, a consortium led by the Polish MOST Foundation aims at supporting the alignment of the new member states’ national and regional research programmes with European IST research in the area of mobile technologies, applications, and services.

The project will accelerate the creation, improvement, and alignment of mobility-related nation

Waves System of France has launched ID-AL (Interactive Digital Audio Line) – its new range of interactive, programmable MP3 players. These new professional MP3 players mean no more looped CDs or badly tuned radios. Fully automated and as easy to use as CD players, ID-AL MP3 players are able to play hundreds of hours of personalised background music and programmed audio messages in public and commercial places.

ID-AL players are highly reliable compared to IT systems. Installed ins

The Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona Research Park has a new company: a spin-off of the UAB and the Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC). MusicStrands uses artificial intelligence techniques to provide people with music recommendations.

At MusicStrands website (www.musicstrands.com) people share their tastes in music and then receive music recommendations. This initiative is the first and only one to use tags applied to music; tags are labels that people can attach on

Fraunhofer IIS, Telos, Omnia, Axia, Broadcast Electronics and Bose participate in world-premiere live demon-stration of non-matrixed 5.1 Surround Sound for FM HD Radio.

Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS and its partners join to present at the 2005 NAB show a first live demonstration. The end-to-end demonstration will involve the complete HD Radio broadcasting chain comprising the studio, on-air broadcasting and automotive digital radio receivers. The original multi-c

Establishing trust quickly is the key to effective Internet communication, especially when it comes to teaching online, according to researchers at New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT).

“While our study focused on trust formation among teachers and students in online courses,” said Nancy Coppola, PhD, associate professor, in the humanities department at NJIT, “our results are applicable for any group or team that interacts online. For example, we think our results could be

A high performance, low-cost wireless home connectivity solution for applications requiring the multi-streaming of high-quality video has been demonstrated by a team of EU-funded researchers.

The technology and system, developed by IST programme-funded ULTRAWAVES project supports high performance, low-cost wireless home connectivity solution for applications requiring the multi-streaming of high-quality video as wireless connectivity between Set Top Boxes, DVD and TV, PC proje

The School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) at the University of Southampton is the first university department to deploy IPv6 in production on its network. Now a team at the School has worked on the technology with Virgin Radio to vastly increase its listening capacity online.

IPv6 (Internet Protocol version 6) provides 340 undecillion addresses (3.4 x 10Ë38) compared to the four billion addresses possible with the current 20-year-old IPv4. Virgin is the first commercial

Capturing and animating human motion for use in virtual reality or in television production is typically long and costly. However that is about to change with the first fast low-cost motion animation system that needs no markers, bodysuits or other sensors.

Using just a PC, two cameras and the motion recognition software developed by the IST programme-funded project HUMODAN, television producers will be able to easily and cheaply create animated characters based on the real-t

EUREKA project E! 3062 DAMAGE has developed a software tool to track and manage digital assets – the sound, illustrations, backgrounds, colour schemes and special effects – for production of a feature-length computer-generated imaging (CGI) animated film. While CGI animation provides popular and profitable entertainment, it has until recently been the multimillion dollar stronghold of the Hollywood giants.

The new software – and Valiant, the film on which it was tested and deve

Professor Anna Brunström, Karlstad University, is heading a research project that will lead to more reliable and secure telecommunications via the Internet. Reliability is an important aspect when telephony moves over to the Internet, so-called IP-telephony.

Today there are three different nets: for telephony, for the Internet, and for cable TV. Researchers believe that all of this traffic will be using the Internet instead. The advantages of IP telephony include lower costs and gr

A ballpoint that detects if we are forging a signature or a substitute in miniature for the CD-ROM are some of the applications that can be carried out using microwires.

3 or 5 times thinner than a human hair, these fine threads were invented in the old Soviet Union for military purposes but, the broader scientific community has been studying them for some time now for other applications – including at the University of the Basque Country (EHU).

Body and coating

EPSRC Press Release

Live TV outside broadcasts that combine real action and computer-generated images could become possible for the first time, thanks to camera navigation technology now under development. The work is opening up the prospect of outdoor sporting, musical or other TV coverage that blends the excitement of being live with the spectacular visual impact that computer graphics can create. It can also be applied at the consumer level, e.g. to enable interior design ideas

What gives radio better sound can help block out background noise, increase tonal recognition in many hearing devices

There’s a reason why we listen to music on the FM dial of our radios – it just sounds better than it does on AM.

And this reason also holds true for cochlear implants and hearing aids. UC Irvine School of Medicine researchers have found that improving frequency modulation, or FM, reception on cochlear implants and hearing aids may increase the quality

Ultra-realistic surround sound is a step closer for everyone thanks to a new method that will cheaply and efficiently compute the way individuals hear things.

Currently, creating accurate ‘virtual sound fields’ through headphones is almost exclusively the domain of high-budget military technologies and involves lengthy and awkward acoustic measurements. The new approach eliminates the acoustic measurement step altogether and promises to produce the required results in mere min