In the middle of last December I got an email from Drew Hemment with a proposition for Distance Lab to get involved in the development of the GloNet event. We enthusiastically embraced the idea, and over the course of the past 3 short months, we have developed some innovative technological solutions for some key challenges in mounting an event like this.
About Distance Lab
But before I get into GloNet, allow me to tell you a little bit more about Distance Lab and why it exists…
Distance Lab is a creative research initiative for digital media technology and design innovation, based in the beautiful highlands of Scotland. We have a particular emphasis on addressing the problems and opportunities found in rural and remote areas of the world. In addition to conducting academic research, Distance Lab works with briefs from industry and governmental partners, providing advice, generating ideas and building prototypes that inspire and can lead to new innovative products and services.
The Scottish government, via development agency Highlands and Islands Enterprise, created Distance Lab for a variety of reasons. Clearly, emerging digital media and networking technologies hold enormous potential for positively transforming economies and lifestyles in rural regions of the world, and in many areas, these technologies have already had a profound effect, yet there is a sense that we have only begun to scratch the surface of what is possible. Three main factors have hindered progress:
1. There has been a lack of research attention to the problems and opportunities to be found in rural and remote areas, which have largely been ignored compared to the large urban centres.
2. Many of the ideas and results generated within academic institutions have often failed to impact on society. Conventional academia is incentivised to publish results to audiences of academics rather than transfer knowledge to industry where it can be put to practical use.
3. Conventional academic structures are known to discourage interdisciplinary collaboration. Too often design and technology lack an appropriate dialogue, and as a result, new technology often fails to have a full and positive impact on society because it is not offered in a way that is usable or meaningful to the people it could benefit.
Distance Lab was created to address these failings of research content, model, and collaboration in such a way as to promote economic and social development in rural and remote areas.
If you come to Distance Lab, you might feel like you are standing in a Scottish branch of the MIT Media Lab, which is where I spent several years of my life doing postgraduate research and study. We don’t just philosophise and write about the future, we are trying to invent it. We emphasize the development of working prototypes and demonstrations of new technologies. Our projects range from technology and design solutions that can be commercialised in the near-term to more far-reaching experiments that inspire and challenge assumptions about how we use technology and how we will deal with various forms of distance in the future.
Getting away from “lecture over television”
To understand our approach to the challenge of GloNet, it is useful to take a look at our approach in another domain – distance learning.
The primary function of many distance learning systems is to deliver live or prerecorded lectures to students spread in different locations. But arguably the most important part of a traditional university experience is everything that happens outside of the lecture hall, i.e. the interaction you get with your peers before and after class, in the study group, in the cafe, in the sports club, in the pub, in the disco… I’m not saying that content is unimportant or that learning a new skill can’t be done by “lecture over television”, but humans are more than merely information-absorbing machines, and there is so much more we could build in to these experiences to increase their value.
A few years ago, the world-renowned Massachusetts of Institute of Technology launched a online system called OpenCourseWare in which the content of nearly all MIT courses was placed online for the entire world to access, completely free of charge. The site includes course notes, presentation slides, readings, exercises, exams, and even video lectures. In launching this site, MIT was making a profound statement – that the real value of a university experience is not in the content. Rather, the value is in the interactions and relationships developed with all of the people at the university that you can only get if you are physically there. That’s what you get when you pay your tuition fees to MIT.
In our research at Distance Lab, rather than focus on online and distance learning systems in a traditional sense (which is a crowded field), we have tried to expand the range of experiences that could be available in distance learning. The perfect example is our work in “sports over a distance”, which allows people in distant locations to engage in a physically exhausting sport together while being able to interact in the same way as in a videoconference. Our studies suggest that by augmenting communication with sports and exertion interfaces, we can create experiences that increase the potential for social bonding and trust to arise. That doesn’t seem surprising given that sports are a great way to “break the ice” with new friends and colleagues that you may work or do business with in the future. Our latest experiment is a boxing-over-a-distance game called Remote Impact, which hopefully we will install at next year’s GloNet! 
GloNet innovations
Just as the informal interaction around university courses is a critical part of the overall learning experience, the informal interaction and mingling you get around the main sessions of a conference are also very important. But how do you get this interaction when participants are spread in different locations in the world as they will be in GloNet? Clearly this is an event model that will become increasingly important as pressures increase to reduce air travel and carbon footprints. But how can we make these distributed experiences as fun as their single-site precedents, or even more fun?
One possible answer to this question is the Talking Boxes, a new project created at Distance Lab and supported by Future Everything, the British Council, and NorthernNet.
The Talking Boxes will address the need for informal interaction between the connected venues of GloNet, mainly during breaks from the formal sessions. They will be continuous all-day videoconference sessions between multiple sites, in an inviting physical form that supports social interaction, spontaneity and chance encounters within the bustling social areas of the event.
Industrial designer Costas Bissas, who recently completed a stint as a Research Associate at Distance Lab, has achieved a fantastic eye-catching physical design that invites informal interaction, inspired literally by the look and feel of old wooden boxes and crates. The boxes have no controls whatsoever – they consist of software that allows them to be controlled remotely over the Internet, so that any box can be connected to any other box on command.
Distance Lab will also be supporting the main sessions of GloNet. In addition to broadcasting a conventional webcast, we will be connecting our Manchester “mission control” to all of the remote venues using a low-latency audiovisual link in order to enable as natural interaction as possible. There are many technical challenges in doing this, not the least of which is the issue of echo cancellation between multiple large room environments with large audiences. Together with FutureEverything, we have devised some innovative session formats to help minimize these issues in an inexpensive way.
Please enjoy the event, and send us your feedback and suggestions for next year!
Stefan Agamanolis, Chief Executive / Research Director, Distance Lab
Tags: Distance Lab, FutureEverything, GloNet, Talking Boxes