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Viewing entries tagged
virtual reality
I've really fallen behind on updating my website, so I'm going to blitz through the last 3 months!
Way back in March, I gave a talk for the doctoral school of the University of Lausanne about ethics and xr sports. It was a great way to think through some new ideas and you can find the entire session here.
I was delighted to be a part of this BBC radio programme, especially since my dear friend Dr Mahfoud Amara is also interviews.
Why is watching sport so important to us as a species? And what happens when that experience is taken away from us? Award-winning sports journalist and broadcaster Clare Balding explores why sport plays such a crucial role in shaping society, speaking to a field of global experts and elite sportspeople, including Martina Navratilova.
In 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic abruptly put a stop to virtually all sporting activity across the globe – and left vast numbers of people staring into an existential void. In sport’s absence, we’ve been hungrily reliving past contests, debating hypothetical scenarios, and doing everything we can to plug the hole in our lives. The crisis has shown how our relationship with sport dominates our lives and our media, our conversations and our leisure time. In this documentary, Clare Balding talks to figures from the worlds of anthropology, philosophy and human behaviour to try to figure out why experiencing sport is so meaningful to us, whether we’re in a crowd, or one of millions following on television and social media.
Her interviewees include the sociologists Akilah Carter-Francique, Mahfoud Amara and Ramachandra Guha; anthropologist Leila Zaki Chakravarty; and philosophers Heather Reid and Andy Martin – who unpick the myriad ways in which our love of sport is deeply embedded in human experience and history, and how our consumption of it has shaped modern society.
Cognitive neuroscientist Sophie Scott reveals what we know about what happens in our brains as we watch sport, whilst bioethicist and technology expert Andy Miah tells Clare how cutting-edge digital advances and the new world of eSports are changing the relationship between fan and sporting event forever.
An Overcoat Media Production for BBC World Service. Produced by Steven Rajam Photo: Liverpool fans at Anfield, Credit: Tembele Bohle, Pexels
It was an absolute pleasure to be involved with an event this week run by the Tokyo 2020 Director of International Communications Tatsuo Ogura, who took time out of his role to produce an independent, charity liveathon about all things digital and sport. For 24hours speakers from all over the world covered a range of topics in an event he wants to become the SXSW of Japan.
My session takes you through the last 20 years of digital innovation, which leads up to how esports are changing the conversation about creativity, culture, and content. You can watch it back here
It was really great to speak at Pro Manchester’s Future of Sport event, alongside my colleague Dr Maria Stukoff. We got into a lot of stuff, but most fun was talking about virtual reality and sports.
I think a lot of people wonder whether VR will go the same way as 3D, but it’s worth remembering that VR is still a developmental technology. Design glitches are getting fixed, new platforms are emerging to make a more comfortable experience and a lot of the people working within this space are really excited by the capacity to make the world more accessible by creating VR experiences of it. I know people who are creating VR interactives of the natural world, which are amazing. There’s a great everest video which gets into the waste left by climbers and how it gets cleaned up.
There’s so much around using VR for good and the health benefits of its integration with sports are vast. So, it may be a bumpy ride, but I think it’s likely that VR - or XR experiences - has reached a critical point in its history where it’s going to become a bigger part of everything we do.
I recently interview for Ubeat, a Spanish esports OTT platform, which featured a film on the relationship between sports and esports. I spoke about the growing range of immersive experiences that are developing around the esports world and how these are beginning to approximate the kinds of things we do in sports.
We can draw a long line of interest in such forms of gaming from Dance Revolution to Nintendo Wii and to Pokemon Go. Bringing physical activity closer to the gaming space is one of my key areas of focus for the next couple of years and it’s such a compelling proposition, as we move into a world that is increasingly anxious about sedentary lifestyles and excessive mobile phone usage,
Here’s the video! And thanks to Emma, who set up the opportunity and produced the content, and to David and the team at Salford University for shooting the film for me during our Virtual Reality Fitness Marathon.
Check out our wider esports work over at Esports Science Insights.
Last week, we ran a Virtual Reality Fitness Marathon as part of our Creative Entrepreneurs day at the University of Salford, which focused on esports. It was a day for bringing people together across a range of disciplines within the university, from health, business, art, science, and digital, to explore the synergy between gaming and physical activity.
Here’s a wider piece on the topic I wrote recently.
Delighted to have another article published in The Conversation, focused on esports and the prospects of virtual reality. Take a peek here
Great to have been in Switzerland for the annual Science Comm conference. So many great people working hard to communicate fantastic research. Here’s a link to my talk, broadcast on Facebook Live.
Getting started at #ScienceComm19
Posted by Andy Miah on Friday, 20 September 2019
It was great to be in Lausanne again last week for #TheSpot2019, a new conference bringing together the worlds of sport and technology. My keynote was focused on the connections between biology and digital technologies, you can read the manuscript over at Medium
Thank you Professor @andymiah for having joined #TheSpot2019 and enriched the programme with your fantastic presentation 👍 @scicommsalford pic.twitter.com/bAqjlTWHJu
— ThinkSport (@ThinkSportCH) May 29, 2019
This week, I was invited to Sheffield International Documentary Festival to take part in a panel on VR and Mental Health. Curaed by Dr Erinma Ochu and featuring Dr Marieke Navin and Dr Maria Panagiotidi, we covered everything from PTSD to dementia. Here's something I wrote on the way to the event.
On 23rd Feb, Manchester Metropolitan University hosted a VR/AR conference, with over 150 delegates from industry and academia. Here's the manuscript of my talk, titled 'In Search of Reality'
As part of our Creative Entrepreneurs event at Salford University, i took part in a panel on how virtual reality can be used to enrich a business. Among the panelists was the amazing Robin McNicholas of Marshmallow Laser Feast and Sarah Jones, a leading influener in VR.
I talked about our Virtual Chernobyl project, which brought people into a place that is uninhabitable, taking them through content that is captured as data by one of our leading researchers. This fusion of communication and research is crucial to us.
At the end, we had a go at doing the mannequin challenge too :)
For the BBC Digital Cities week at University of Salford, I gave a talk on VR, which looked at the cross over between what cities are doing with digital and how sports are evolving into these spaces. The BBC's Academy came along to produce an interview, captured by Charles Miller here.
The amazing Beth Hewitt at Salford University produced this fantastic afternoon event within the BBC Digital Cities week, which I opened with a talk on how Virtual Reality is changing what sports involve. Here's a summary of the event from the BBC's journalist Charles Miller, who came up from London to capture some of the afternoon.
As part of the BBC Digital Cities week, I was delighted to take part and open the VR/AR Show and Tell event at Manchester Metropolitan University's Digital Innovation hub last week. It brought together some really amazing pioneers in VR, demonstrating how it can be an interface for research, industry, art, and entertainment. It was a fantastic affirmation of England's vibrant North West VR/AR network!
Among the people there was WizDish, which is a fantastic low friction platform to allow a player of a VR game to physically walk on the plate, thus moving a character within the digital game. Here's what it looks like.
Today, I am in Switzerland, giving a talk about how to utilize social media to build a reputation as a researcher. My take on this is to think about how best to utilize the range of creative media around us, as academics, and to explore the overlap between journalism and academia in that pursuit.
This configuration allows us to develop a holistic approach to nurturing reputation, with community building, and awareness raising, while ensuring that we don't treat the media as a static entity.
We need to ensure that our use of media - social or otherwise - is not just about instrumental values, but about co-creating and innovating as researchers.
Last week, I was in Paris giving a talk for the News Media Coalition about how to future proof in a rapidly changing media industry. I covered everything from social media to virtual reality. There's so much work here to be done, but journalism has something we need to protect. Here's my talk:
This week, I am in Lausanne for the Sport Future Rendezvous 2016 conference, organized by good friend Professor Jean-Loup Chappelet at the University of Lausanne. I took the chance to talk about the biodigital interface, the growth of e-sport, biotechnological change, ingestible sensors, and virtual realities. But the big controversy, as always, was my views around doping, which did hijack the futures debate a little. In any case, here's my presentation.
Thanks to Michel Filliau for the photograph.
This week, I was over in Dublin for a Virtual Reality conference organized by Professor Timothy Jung in collaboration with the Dublin Institute of Technology. I covered all things virtual and sport, here's what I said....
This last few days, I have been working with an amazing group of people from Salford in producing the Virtual Chernobyl Experience around the 30th Anniversary of the Disaster.
This video is still the best overview of what we did.
All of these people need credit for their extraordinary efforts in making it happen. They all came through at short notice and put time in well beyond the job description and they are all yet more reasons for why I feel very lucky at Salford to have such talented, versatile people.
They are:
Dr Mike Wood, Lead Scientist - will literally fly through the night to get the job done
Simon Campion - VR wizard who worked the Oculus content
Mikhail Polshaw - VR go to for 360 rendering at short notice
Dr Gary Kerr - sci comm agitator, evaluator, and all round 'can doer'
Ross Fawkes - science guy, PhD aspiring
Moo - puts radiation detectors on Reindeer
Rosie Mawdsley - Producing ninja at MSI Manchester
Justin Webb - Press master at MSI
Gareth Holllyman - Press 2.0 doer at Salford Uni
Nicol Caplin - the fastest sci comm'r in town. all the way up from Bristol
Darren Langlands - videographer at Salford Uni
...and a whole bunch of STEM volunteers who went the extra mile
And here's what we did...CBBC Newsround
