Welcome

Here goes - the first blog regarding The Talking Walls, what it is, how it started, where it is going and how it is getting there.

The Talking Walls is a templated multimedia application that is designed to be visually rich, educational and entertaining. It was designed primarily for cultural heritage tourism sites, to enhance and stimulate children's perception of heritage sites whilst visiting with either parents or in school groups. The first design in 1995 / 96 was for a DVD / kiosk application in response to a final year 'real' project brief for a degree in Computer Animation and Illustration at Portsmouth University. The heritage site involved was National Trust's Dunster Castle, nr Minehead in Somerset.

In 2001, I started a Masters degree at Solent University in Interactive Production to continue with the idea. By 2003, The Talking Walls had developed considerably and incorporated a unique concept, termed the KubeMatrix, I was awarded a Masters with Distinction and had a prototype to take forward to show Dunster Castle and others. This prototype was still mostly for DVD / Kiosk and web but I had also started to look at the possibility of the application being used on handheld devices.

This took hold and parts of the application were re-designed to work on a handheld device / smartphone. The re-working was the functionality / programming and the use of the KubeMatrix as the interface as well navigation through the content and the property. This was then presented at the Innoventions 2004 exhibition at Intec, Winchester, where it received the Highly Commended for Commercial Viability award.

Since then, it has been presented to Paul Clifford, Learning and Interpretation Manager at the British Museum, who considered it to be the best handheld application he had seen in his two and a half year research for just such applications to use at the museum, the Heritage Houses Association, the National Trust Learning division and English Heritage's Ancient Monuments. The application has also been presented at the EVA 2007 conference, and more recently to my fellow Digital Horizon participants in London, who gave me fantastic feedback (thankyou everyone, your comments have been very helpful).

The subject matter of my PhD (Solent University) is innovation and creativity for mobile content, so this should help define and further develop The Talking Walls application for mobile content, and hopefully become a very exciting educational, visual and cultural learning bank of information that users are able to interact with and re-purpose to suit their own interests and skill levels.

Alongside the part-time PhD, I am a particpant on a very informative and well organised year long course of Masterclasses and seminars - Digital Horizons. This is being run and organised by SEMN, SEEDA, Wired Sussex and Screen South and concludes in May 2008. Further information on Digital Horizons can be found on this link: http://www.southeastmedianetwork.co.uk/digitalhorizons.htm.

The DH particpants are all creative people mostly within the film and music industry with a sprinkling of digital graphic artists. Extremely talented people all round and quite inspirational to be amongst. It will be interesting to see how we all progress.

Another good piece of news this past week is having been accepted on the 'Flying Start for Women' programme, organised by the National Council of Graduate Entrepreneurship. This starts officially on the 7th/8th and 9th of January in York, and is a year long help and support programme aimed at getting the company trading by the end of the year. http://www.flyingstart-ncge.com/newwomen/index.php?page=aims-of-flying-start

I hope to keep this site updated with all news on how these areas are progressing and research areas being covered for the PhD. If you have any suggestions or would like to chat regarding thisit would be great to hear from you.