On February 17th a H2020 concertation meeting took place organized by the European Commission DG Connect unit. The meeting was a chance for several projects within the H2020 funding programmes for ICT in creative industries to learn about each other and connect and form possible collaborations. The Netherlands Institute for Sound & Vision, as part of the ACE Creative team to help small businesses grow and scale internationally, helped host the ACE Creative Innovation Clinics as part of our effort to identify relevant technological innovations and connect them to innovative creative start-ups.
NEW PROJECTS, NEW TECHNOLOGY
In the morning, some of the newest projects took to the stage to explain their work in creative innovation, here we highlight some innovations that are emerging from H2020 projects:
AudioCommons - The Audio Commons Initiative aims at promoting the use of open audio content and at developing technologies with which to support an envisioned ecosystem of content repositories, production tools and users.
ABC DJ
ABC DJ aims to develop a platform offering music for branding purposes, such as instore music. The project also aims to provide a large empirical basis for scientific questions regarding the construction of the meaning of music: there will be a large listening test where participants will be asked to rate songs on typical brand value attributes.
First.stage - First.stage aims to offer easy previsualization methods for creative agencies. Current tools require trained specialists, but the first.stage outcome will offer an easy interface for novice users.
Replicate - will try to enable rapid VR/3D/MR prototyping with your smartphone in order to stimulate everybody to create 3D content, not just behind the computer with mouse and keyboard, but in the physical spaces where the objects are placed.
SPARK - will create a spatial augmented reality (SAR) platform where participants in a meeting can quickly visualize their ideas to improve the co-design process, supporting product packaging and product design in the early ideation stage.
U_CODE - This project aims to develop a platform for urban city planning and design in which large crowds can participate. The platform will enable massive collaboration, stimulating early-on public participation in urban design.
All the project presentations and contact information can be found here.
Technical challenges and opportunities
During this session the group focused on specific challenges the new projects were facing, such as:
- Web platforms and cloud services: many of the proposed technologies involve the platform paradigm or services in the cloud. How does this differ from current technological (and ownership) infrastructure, and how does for instance cloud contracting shape the service that can be offered?
- Availability and compatibility of digital files in traditional industry sectors: the use case of furniture manufacturing was used to illustrate the challenge of file standards being developed for one industry that might be of use to another industry. The FURNIT-SAVER project aims to fill this gap, what are their challenges?
- The user perspective: how can we improve personalization and recommender techniques? Projects such as MECANEX tackle this issue.
- Challenges of new exploitation models: open licenses and open source models cause a shift in value: the technology is free, but the knowledge and extra development support can be monetized. This is one of the business models that AXIOM, an open source hardware camera, might explore.
ACE CREATIVE INNOVATION WORKSHOP
As part of the ACE Creative delegation, Dario Mazzella of META Group advised the project groups in terms of how to market their technology and how to put the focus on investment readiness. As part of the activities of META Group, Dario has a lot of experience assessing technological activity within EU projects and helping them evaluate in terms of exploitation opportunities for the market. You can view Dario’s presentation with tips and tricks here.
After the workshop there was time for the session members to talk one-on-one to ACE Creative team members for customized support. Sound & Vision spoke with AXIOM and Q-TALES to discuss collaboration opportunities and exchange knowledge. Both projects partake in very interesting innovative technology that we wish to highlight:
Q-TALES is targeted at the creative e-book authoring community by offering a digital e-book authoring tool where initiators can start new e-book projects and collaborate with other authors. They can then publish their book to the Q-tales platform to offer it to the public either for free or for a premium. Readers are then able to read the e-book on their device of choice as it exports it automatically in the appropriate formats for tablets, PCs and iMacs. One important factor of Q-tales is that they will focus on becoming WebGL compliant as the support for plug-ins in browsers is dropping in the near future (eliminating plug-ins such as Silverlight, Java, Flash).
AXIOM The AXIOM project is building an open hardware and free software digital cinema camera as a platform for multiple digital imaging applications. The initiative started originally from a creative community interested in tweaking camera technology, and grew with the help of a crowdfunding campaign. The result is an incredibly flexible piece of technology that can be applied in many different sectors such as scientific photography as well as the maker community.
READ MORE
- Visit the EC page about this concertation meeting with all projects and powerpoints listed
- Visit ACE Creative for more information - call for new creative ICT start-ups to apply now open until March 31!