The Worm Hole

Hyperaudio at the Mozilla Festival

This year has run contrary to previous years of my life in the sense that it seems to have lasted much longer than the year before. This may have something to do with a small addition to the family that arrived in March and the consequent ramping up of waking hours, but I prefer to think it’s because things are moving so quickly in that wonderful place we call the worldwide web, that it seems that too much has happened to compress into a year.

It was only a year ago for example, when I started tinkering with jPlayer to couple text and audio and was asked to show off a very small demo at the first Mozilla Festival in Barcelona last year.

A few months later I was introduced to and became involved with something known as Hyperaudio and was given the opportunity to create a couple of proof-of-concept demos : Denmark Radio’s Hyperdisken Demo and the Radiolab/Soundcloud collaboration ( a shout-out to Henrik Moltke for doing much of the groundwork for these demos and my colleagues at Happyworm without which they just wouldn’t have been possible).

Further on through the arc of this epic year, I took part in the Mozilla Knight Journalism challenge where I was encouraged to research and blog some ideas on a tool I called the Hyperaudio Pad. Happily I was flown over to Berlin with other like minded MoJo peeps, for a week of intense discussion, collaboration and hacking and managed to get the first semblance of an actual product out of the door.

Which brings me in a round-about way to this year’s Mozilla Festival, where I will again be demoing and chatting about the coupling of text and media and the other things that Hyperaudio is (or could be) about. This all at the Science Fair on Friday, 4th of November and a Hyperaudio Workshop / Design Challenge on Saturday, 5th.

The Science Fair will be all about demos, chatting to people interested in the general Hyperaudio concept and making sure I don’t spill my drink over my laptop. Meanwhile in the workshop we hope to put the Hyperaudio Pad through it’s paces and actually make something with it, while gathering ideas and maybe hacking on some of them into the bargain. It should be a fun mix of hacks, hackers, designers, audio buffs and basically anybody curious enough to be involved. The session will be fairly free flow but the plan so far is to:

• Briefly chat about and demo the Hyperaudio concept, what it can do and with whom we can collaborate.
• Breakout into groups to come up with new ideas, applications and designs.
• Reconvene and talk about the group’s ideas.
• Breakout into groups to work on these ideas, whether it is creating a programme, UI mockups, story-boarding functionality or even developing small demos.
• Creating something we can show other people – hopefully a program created with the Hyperaudio Pad but also some new ideas.

Hopefully we can cram this all into 3 hours. Folk from the BBC, Universal Subtitles, Sourcefabric and other cool people are planning to be in attendance, which should make for some interesting crossovers and fantastic opportunities to consult and maybe even influence organisations in a position to use the stuff we’re making. Additionally the BBC are providing us with some fantastic media to work with.

All will be revealed over the weekend, book your place and get your eyes and ears ready to be part of the Hyperaudio experience.

Tags: Audio, HTML5, hyperaudio, jPlayer, Mozilla