I was privileged to be a part of the Future Tech 2010 Conference in Media City, Salford this week, surrounded by a broad cross-section of digital media and technology types, exploring the exciting new projects and initiatives launching across the North West over the next 12 months.
I was seriously impressed with the enthusiasm and vigour with which MIDAS (Manchester's regional development agency) and North West screen agency Vision+Media are generating a genuine buzz of excitement around technological and digital innovation, which puts efforts in the North East to shame.
For them, innovation is more than just a tired cliché, but something to be nurtured and encouraged from the provision of support for budding young entrepreneurs to a new wave of tech-savvy investors looking to put the venture back into British venture capitalism, and start competing with Silicon Valley for dominance over the European digital space.
A now overwhelming urge to relocate my business operation to Manchester aside, there is something else happening over in the North West that I was keen to get my teeth into: Project Canvas.
Since the BBC announced that they were moving their interactive and R&D departments (amongst others) from London to MediaCity in Salford Quays, there has been a flurry of interest in this area as a hub for progressive digital and technology enterprises of all sizes.
Representatives from the BBC's Project Canvas team gave a short demonstration of the platform, the new set-top box, and some of the interactive prototypes they have been working on over the last few months. It has to be said, that I was very excited at the prospect of finally seeing it in the flesh. The draft specifications are an interesting read, but nothing tells the story like a fully functioning user interface on a TV right in front of you.
Having seen it for real, it left me with more questions than answers, and far more than I could list here. I have a number of reservations around the user experience, the appropriateness of the television screen for some of the interactivity they described. I couldn't help but feel that the specification was being written around what they could do, rather than what they should. But that's what innovation is all about - exploration - so I'm remaining open minded for now.
The biggest disappointment for me, though, was the performance. I'm accustomed to browsing the web with a desktop, a MacBookPro or a modern games console - all of which are equipped with extremely powerful graphics chipsets capable of running high definition video content and animated user interfaces at once without dropping frames. However, the set-top box used to demo Project Canvas obviously wasn't up to the task, and the frame-rate was unacceptably choppy. It reminded me of a super-charged 'red button' interface, which I'm sure we all remember before it was universally panned by brands and broadcasters as a useless gimmick.
Clearly, Canvas has a long way to go before it can meet the expectations of a speed-hungry web-browsing public, so we can't be too harsh on it right now - it's early days. But therein lies the problem; with the first Google-enabled Sony TV's and Logitech set-top boxes going on sale little more than a week from now, Project Canvas is in real danger of being left behind.
