Fantastic to take part in a panel this week in MediaCity for delegations from India and Brazil, seeking to invest into Greater Manchester.
Viewing entries in
Digital
Marking the end of the first phase of the MediaCity Immersive Technologies Hub, this showcase was a fantastic celebration of all the work done . Discover more about our next phase on LinkedIn
Last week, I was delighted to give a talk at the Manchester City Council Leadership Summit about how artificial intelligence is changing the workplace.
Here's what I covered...
Neuralink
OpenAI specifically AI operators
Meta FAIR neuroscience
The Paris AI Summit
UK AI Government Playbook
World Economic Forum Future of Work report 2025
Google NotebookLM
HeyGen and AI avatars/influencers
Canva AI
…and the many projects we have in the MediaCity Immersive Technologies Innovation Hub which are experimenting with AI.
So much to discuss and figure out!
My latest publication examines the prospect of neurological implants and how this will affect the way we think about the human computer interface. Podcast episode soon on that...
It was a pleasure to be back again at the SEG3 conference taking place in London, having the opportunity to discuss the future of technology with Herman Narula. We covered a lot of ground, but the one area that struck me most was the part of the discussion that focused on values and how a metaverse can be a place where new value systems around digital living can image. This seems crucial at a time when there is significant concern about data expolitation.
Interviewed on the Nigel Farage show on GB News, where I argued that it is a failure of our educational system that we are in this situation. The opportunity for learners to use powerful computers in the classrooms is something we desperately need to enable, but we’ve not managed to secure their use as educational tools.
There's a huge amount of talk about the metaverse, but if you're new to this world and wondering what it's all about, then where can you begin?
I've dropped content from a few metaverse worlds into this video, but I'm particularly excited to include footage from a recent PixelMax experience.
I'm really excited to be working with PixelMax and we'll be sharing more about projects we have in the pipeline later, bringing together Salford University and MediaCityUK. In the mean time, if you're a developer wanting to work with their SDK, then you can head over to here for registration.
https://pixelmax.com/products/sdk
If you'd just like to play around and see what's coming around the corner in the PixelMax store soon, then take a look at the demo site: https://pixelmax.com/demo
Some thoughts ahead of #HostCity2022 next week.
"COVID has brought about a step change in audience expectations, which must be seen in the context of a longer history of making our live and remote experiences increasingly immersive, flexible, and technologically enabled. The Web2 era nurtured this desire and COVID embedded the expectation, readying us for web3.
For sure, the error we make is concluding that this is a move away from the importance of physical space as a crucial component of a compelling experience, but what's changing is the capacity to level up the physical world with immersive integrations which have been prototyped during COVID. Audiences expect to be more active and the data driven event economy finds a crucial extension through volumetric and locative audience data.
The future of the elite event experience is phygital - e.g watching digital content layered over a physical swimming pool and seeing the projection of Olympic swimmers live into the space, as it happens, or the transition of triathlons into arena based virtual worlds, or running in your gym alongside athletes as they compete. These are our clues which shed light onto the future and it's as big a shift as was the design of the amphitheatre in ancient Greece.
In this context, rights holders need to massively rethink what they do and what they are in relation to their audience. Simply staging something isn't enough anymore. The Olympic Channel is a great example of how institutions are experimenting to find their feet in a world where the media proposition around events is vastly different. The MVP in this future is to wrangle the innovation community that can remake events for a vastly different set of audience expectations."
Join us for Host City in Glasgow next week!
Delighted to be interviewed by Fortune magazine writer Jonathan Vanian on what Clubhouse means for our future in social media. Audio communities are doing incredibly well at the moment, signalling a desire for retreating from video into the less intense, more intimate space of sound. The full article is behind a pay wall, but here’s the link.
A few weeks ago, I was interviewed for an article in the Washington Post, written by Nick Busca, who does fantastic work writing about new technology. You can access the article here (hopefully!)
Today, took part in an event produced by the Manchester organizations Future Everything and MIDAS, focused on discussions about ethics and digital technology. You can view the whole session here.
I’m really excited to share the publication of my Wellcome Trust report, which builds on research investigating the experiences of young people through digital health. There’s so much in it and I’d really recommend a deep dive into the report, which you can find on our dedicated website.
Digital homeschooling: we need to rethink our worries about children's screen time
We’ve spent the last decade being anxious about the increasing amount of time young people spend in front of screens. However, in the last two months, children have been encouraged to dive into digital like never before. This has thrown up all kinds of questions about how to keep well online in a time where being outside and together in physical space has been impossible.
Parents have sought to employ digital platforms any way they can to ensure their children remain intimately connected to their friends, fearful of the time they are missing socialising, playing, learning and sharing.
Where previously we may have been sceptical of digital learning compared to face-to-face experiences, it has become central to children’s homeschooling and a great deal of positives have come out of it. In addition to work set by schools, children in the UK and across the world have engaged with new teachers. Many have been exercising with Joe Wicks or doing maths with Carol Vorderman.
These digital learning experiences have been the best option for children under lockdown, yet this is hard to reconcile with our previous worries about limiting screen time. Seemingly overnight, even organisations that had warned us about being in digital space too much now advocate their use.
The World Health Organization, for example, has been working with gaming companies as a way of promoting key COVID-19 health messages. This comes less than two years after it identified excessive gaming as a possible health disorder. While this partnership is far from a general policy on promoting gaming for health, it has sent the message that gaming is an important way to maintain mental health during a long period of social isolation.
With social distancing and homeschooling likely to be a feature of children’s lives for some time yet, we need new ways to think about the time young people spend in digital space. Some helpful guidance can be found in a 2019 report published by the Royal College of Paediatrics and Public Health, which outlined guidance for children’s screen use.
The report did not specify putting time limits on screen time, nor did it say that certain kinds of screen exposure are worse or better than others. Instead, it invited families to talk about their collective screen health together and discuss when it seemed to be making family time worse. The report invited families to ask themselves four questions:
- Is screen time in your household controlled?
- Does screen use interfere with what your family wants to do?
- Does screen use interfere with sleep?
- Are you able to control snacking during screen time?
Answering these questions in 2020 feels like a very different exercise, but they’re still a really great place to start when helping children – and adults – through this difficult period.
The impact of extra screen time
One of the big challenges for researchers right now is understanding the impact of the extra screen time young people are experiencing during lockdown. We have no precedents for such conditions and most of the research on screen time is still in the context of a life where a big part of a child’s day is within a school setting.
For this reason, we need more data to understand how the extra screen time is affecting young people, but it’s reasonable to conclude that it all depends how that screen time is orchestrated. For example, being in front of a Joe Wicks workout and doing exercise is likely a very different category of experience than being on social media.
This is why active gaming and even virtual reality experiences could usher in an entirely new way of thinking about the screen and its impact on our lives. We already have evidence that active gaming experiences can promote physical wellbeing.
It’s also worth thinking about how this time offers an opportunity to completely rethink what and how we learn. Children can access lessons and courses from all over the world, which provides a chance for them to engage with children and teachers from other countries. Even astronauts on the International Space Station have been reading stories to children.
Through all of this, it’s crucial to remember that we’re not simply homeschooling or working from home, but trying hard to do these things in extraordinary times. In the rush to maintain standards and normality, we need to remember that a completely different approach is perfectly okay right now.
Andy Miah, Chair in Science Communication & Future Media, University of Salford
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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
Last week, the Digital Health Generation project I have been working on with Emma Rich, Sarah C. Lewis, and Deborah Lupton had a major event in the House of Commons, sponsored by Lisa Cameron MP.
The evening was a culmination of our work over this last year and aimed to kickstart a conversation about how the future of healthcare ensures that young people are at the heart of plans.
Here are some of the slides from the evening.
In February, we ran our first webinar focused on the Digital Health Generation. Find out about what we are investigating for this Wellcome Trust funded project, trying to make sense of what digital health means to young people. Here's what we covered.
Last month, I interviewed for Glamour Magazine about the future of jobs. It's a fun piece covering everything from VR directors to prosthetic technicians!
I am in the process of completing an article and am now thinking about to which journal I will submit it, so I thought I'd put out a teaser of its structure and seek opinions/interest. It is broadly about the future of wearable/implantable technology and takes the period of working with Google Glass as an insight into this world, drawing on a range of datasets. It is based on 2 years of work with Glass from 2013-2015 and the article is likely to be about 10,000 words. I'm expecting to finish it over the summer and am interested in editors who might like to receive a submission. If that's you, please get in touch. And here's a link to some of the more informal experiments, along with a talk I gave at Google HQ about the subject.
Ok Glass?
The Aspirations and Anxieties of the
Google Glass Generation.
Abstract
This article explores the two-year period in which Google Glass was promoted publicly and released commercially on an Open Beta ‘explorer’ basis (2013-2015). It examines the aspirations of the developers and advocates and the anxieties of of (potential) user groups and eventual reactions of new users, to understand how people imagine the impact of and experience wearable technologies. The research draws on six datasets, which consist of YouTube videos, tweets from Twitter, and video recordings of user, to create an impression of what took place around the emergence of Glass. Together, the datasets create a complex device ethnography of Glass, which speak to its imagined transformative potential and a future where wearable technologies generally, which foreground a new research agenda for digital culture scholars.
Introduction
The Limits of Digital Design
Methodology
Background on the Google Glass Experiments
How Glass Worked
What Could Glass Do?
Findings
What Google Wanted from Glass
How ‘Explorers’ Used Glass
How Customers Imagined Glass
How Parody Explained User Anxieties
What People Saw Through Glass
The First 10 Seconds of Glass Experience
Discussion
Google Glass: The Story so Far
Conclusion: Was Google Glass a Failure?
Last week, I was in Bath for an ESRC seminar about Digital Health and the Older Generation, set up by Cassie Phoenix. Within my closing talk for the day, I was able to get into the many ways that healthcare is being transformed through digital systems, mobile culture, artificial intelligence, and ingestible sensors. The latest article I wrote on this was published in Health Sociology Review and is with my colleague Dr Emma Rich, with whom we presently have a Wellcome Trust grant to explore how young people use digital environments to make sense of health.
Today, I am speaking at the Digital Sport Innovation event at Hotel Football. My talk focused on a proposition to create an Augmented Reality Gym, which brings together a range of interests I have in eSport, mHealth, Cities, Events and social media. Here's a glimpse into what that might look like.
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'