Entertainment and the arts

Entertainment and the arts research

360º video

Femi Adeyemi-Ejeye investigated subjective test methodologies for 360º video on a head-mounted display. This was an international collaboration involving 10 labs and more than 300 participants. Involved were members of the Immersive Media Group (IMG) of the Video Quality Experts Group (VQEG). The results from this collaboration led to the development of ITU-T Recommendation P.919.

Social media

The increasingly important role of social media in facilitating student mobility from India is being researched by Sazana Jayadeva, a research fellow on the EuroStudents project, a comparative study of the role and influence of students in higher education.

Sound

Tim Brookes is working on methods to assess spatial sound quality without the need for a human listener, with potential to be applied to room acoustics, concert hall acoustics, sound recordings and more. Through perceptually motivated measurement of spatial sound attributes for audio-based information systems, he is investigating objective measurements that relate to certain attributes of the perceived spatial impression of a sound.

An EU-funded project is developing novel methods to convert audio-visual content into words. Kim Starr is involved in the project methods for managing audio visual data: combining automatic efficiency with human accuracy (MeMAD). The project utilises a combination of computer vision technologies, human input and machine learning approaches to derive enhanced descriptions of audio-visual content.

Translation

Félix do Carmo’s project, Knowledge-Assisted Interactive Translation, Editing and Revising (KAITER), aims at developing a translation editor that estimates and suggests translation editing actions, integrated into a system that helps translators manage their specialisation.

The use of video-mediated interpreting in legal settings has been researched by Sabine Braun, of the Centre for Translation Studies (CTS). She has led several multinational European projects in this area (AVIDICUS 1-3) and has contributed knowledge on video-mediated interpreting to other European projects relating to interpreter certification and training for legal professionals.

A team at the CTS, led by Sabine, worked on a project to create the first bespoke 3D virtual environment that supports the training and use of interpreters. ‘Interpreting in Virtual Reality’ addressed the needs of future interpreters and users of interpreters in higher education, vocational training and adult learning contexts to acquire and apply skills in a 3D virtual setting.

User interfaces

Doris Dippold has recently looked at how the prompt response turns of a commercial chatbot can be improved to make the bot easier to interact with and customers more likely to complete a sales interaction to completion. Her work utilises interactional sociolinguistics and micro-level linguistic analysis to 'inform the redesign of prompt:response chatbot turns’.

A project looking at user satisfaction of machine translation offer benefits to software companies that have shorter release cycles, more volume and languages, and less money to invest in translation. Ana Guerberof Arena’s research project, correlations between localisation quality and usability on machine and human translated user interface strings: a study using eye-tracking and telemetry, investigates the role of language in the user experience.

Virtual reality

Collaborative project, ALIVE: live-action lightfields for immersive VR experiences, aims to develop technologies to capture live-action content as a fully immersive virtual reality experience, where the viewer has the freedom to move inside the content. Adrian Hilton is working on this eighteen-month industrial partnership between Foundry and Figment Productions together with University of Surrey and funded by InnovateUK.