Communications Media

A team of young explorers from the Climate Change College are on a ten day field trip, participating in ESA’s CryoSat validation experiment on the Greenland Ice Sheet. To stay in touch, the team is using Inmarsat’s Broadband Global Area Network (BGAN), a technology development supported by ESA.

Led by Dutch polar explorer Marc Cornelissen, the students have set up camp on the ice and are assisting with experiments which will be used to validate results from the CryoSat mission. Ground

The University of Surrey has marked the launch a new range of degree programmes in Media Engineering with the opening of a purpose-built laboratory to provide students with access to professional quality audio-visual studio production facilities.

Integrating a traditional degree in electronics and computing with an understanding of modern digital systems engineering for music, video and computer graphics production, Media Engineering should be of interest to anyone with an interest in

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