 But in proper tradition, we'll start by running the VT titles and you have to read the clapperboard very carefully. I was too chicken to go on the top of that cherry picker more than once, but that was what buses looked like in 1986 in the centre of Chester. A bit of 35mm film transferred to one inch video and finally ending up as an H.264 MPEG4 video. I've been through more changes than, well, there's bound to be some more musical joke there, which I forget. I'm going to talk starting off anyway about the Doomsday project. For those of you who don't know what the Doomsday project was, it was a project by the BBC to celebrate the 800th anniversary of William the Conqueror's Doomsday book. I say William the Conqueror, he was actually more popularly known as William the Bastard in England at the time. But not many people actually got away with calling in that, so he tended to be known as the Conqueror. Of course, the only date everybody knows, 1066, was when the Normans invaded. By 1086, tax money was needed and consequently, you can't tax something until you've counted it. And so William sent out loads of commissioners all around at least the bit of England he was controlling, because the Danes still controlled some bits. Actually, I can't quite remember whether the Danes controlled this part of Yorkshire, but certainly not much further north than here. It was still run by the Vikings. To count everything, the King owned all the land, but who actually looked after it for him? Everything right down, as they said, to the last pig. The BBC decided, as well as doing some programmes, there's nothing quite like an anniversary to get some programmes past the people paying for them, that we try and do something interactive. And so the Doomsday Project involved mostly school children writing about their local areas, taking photographs, not always school children, but mostly, because they're a lot easier to organise than the general public. That was one of the two video discs, and the other video disc was made up of information from a more national nature, like information from the most recent census, for example. But I'm going to go back a bit. What I said I'd talk about here was more to do with choices of technology than what the Doomsday Project itself actually did. But if you go to doomsday.org.uk, you'll find my rambly explanation of quite a lot of things related to this particular thing. It started in 1984 with me and a few others ensconced in an office by Queen's Park Rangers football ground, but not in a position where you could actually see the play. You kind of could just see out, you couldn't see in. But to go back a couple of years before that, I'd been producing music for the BBC, and then a previous boss asked me if I'd go and help him to set up BBC video, and I agreed because I felt like it was a time for change, as the Rolling Stones said in Sympathy for the Devil, and ended up at the start of BBC video. Now, the early 80s were an interesting time for video, lots of completing formats. One of it was video discs, and I was quite interested in what you could do with Philip's laser vision format because I looked at the specification. Video tapes were basically fairly crappy in terms of quality. They just about cut it, really. But when it worked well, the Philip's video disc was very good. It also had one interesting feature. It had the bandwidth and the stability to handle teletext. And 1982, teletext was well established. Every new television set that you bought had teletext in it. So the idea was, let's put a teletext magazine on a video disc. If you play this through your TV and you've got a teletext decoder, you just watch the teletext like you would with any ordinary program. So we had subtitles and we had loads of pages of information about the birds. So it was a fully interactive, in a sense, anyway, thing that was bolted all together. I took a BBC micro, wrote a program to control the video disc because it was divided up one section on each bird. This was the disc that lots of people experimenting with interactive video, usually with a BBC micro and a Philips or Pioneer disc player used. So we all had to go with it. I also then tried pulling the teletext information off the disc via a teletext decoder and incorporating that within the program. So by the end of this, there was this actually very flaky in technical terms. But once it worked, quite interesting piece of kit. It wasn't much smaller than that thing, actually, by the time we put the monitor and the disc player and the computer and everything else with it and had to wheel it around. And one day I got a visit from a chap named Peter Armstrong who was interested in the idea of doing an interactive documentary. So we discussed what the video discs could do, quickly gave up on the notion of doing a more conventional, if you like, interactive documentary because you basically only had about 54 minutes of video on one side of the disc and on one type of disc there were two formats for this disc, one of which was you could still frame on the other you couldn't, basically for the techies one where it had a constant angular velocity like a gramophone record, there you could stop on the still frame or jump instantly to pretty well to any frame on the disc well instantly within a couple of seconds. Or there was the long play version which was just under an hour but that had constant linear velocity which ironically was one of the early formats of a gramophone record but it never caught on because the pickup actually had to have a little wheel on it to drive the record around and it didn't work too well. So yeah, 54,000 frames or 36 minutes, Peter went away as far as I can remember came back the next day and said, right we're going to have lots of still frames, lots of maps, lots of photos what are we going to do about the data? Peter says it wasn't exactly the next day and he'd been working on this for a long time but I remember it as being pretty instant. Just to give you an idea of, we can just forget about videotape for the moment although videotape was used in interactive projects back then usually if you had quite a lot of patience to wait for it to spool backwards and forwards between the various sections but there were four types of video discs that were around Phillips pioneer laser vision, laser disc with a K pioneer was laser disc, Phillips was laser vision they were actually completely compatible, exactly the same format and that rather like CD and DVD and all those other formats now basically used a little laser, an infrared laser and read the absence or presence of pits in a spiral on the discs to go back a little bit someone from Phillips once told me that when Phillips originally thought about the idea of putting video onto a disc what they envisaged was a tiny little spiral of real visible frames like you'd taken a film and you'd gone like this all the way around and put it onto a disc and then they quickly realized actually we don't need to do that, we can use television which is what they did so the Phillips video disc about which I know the most technically used what's called pulse width modulation this got all the journalists confused because pulse width modulation is an analog format it's not a digital format basically you have this wave form of the TV picture and you just chop it and however long the chopped bits are that is the length of the pits or the ground that you have on the disc and then when you play that back you filter it and you get the video out it was apparently very simple to do very susceptible to noise but very stable and certainly in Europe had a bandwidth of 5.25 MHz which was as good if not better than broadcast pile television Thorny MI just to give you the other what the competition was and why it was never got anywhere near being interactive the Thorny MI video high density system it's used to stylus now nobody actually had used a stylus for video disc since Logey Bed in I think it was about 1928 with his 78's called superior radio vision apparently there's one still in existence in Bradford at the museum and you can play it back and you can see this 30 vertical line John Logey Bed picture coming off it no sound of course maybe the sound was on the other side I don't know but no they actually had it was like a Hill and Dale system so the groove was going up and down as it went around the disc but and this is the bit that really puzzled me it was not possible to move the stylus fast enough because of its mass to follow the groove properly so they assumed that the stylus was going to be kicked along by the groove underneath it as you played it goodness knows how long the discs would last the ones I saw didn't last very long because they were actually quite thin and flimsy and the player had a clamp to clamp them in and before long someone would forget to put the disc in the right place drop the clamp and cut a hole often right through the modulation on the disc even the engineers at Thornin Hayes did that so I don't think VHD ever made it to the public to be honest okay the one that did was the RCA Selectivision this was a bit more sophisticated if you're old enough you may well have seen these almost being given away towards the end of its life loads of movies that was a capacitance based disc the other one that I find really interesting which actually was used interactively but was never marketed in Europe was McDonald Douglas the airplane manufacturers had this thing they called laser film which was transmissive you shine the laser through a transparent disc and read the information that was on it had the big advantage that you basically replicated it by developing it like a photograph or perhaps more like an x-ray I may even use the same kind of stock and that was used quite a bit in the States why McDonald Douglas you may ask but actually the airplane manufacturers had a big problem that if you bought a 747 the manuals particularly for maintenance would fill the whole wall of your office so the idea of being able to manually handle all that information was quite attractive to them and they poured loads of money into it and they kept coming back actually years later I ended up having another meeting with them actually it was from a company called General Dynamics which I always kept thinking about you know those Larry Niven Pearson puppeteers who have a company called General Products that makes spaceships I always thought General Dynamics was like that because General Dynamics are the people who make nuclear submarines I found out later for the American military so anyway that was the other thing that was there the Phillips Pioneer Laser Disc tended to be the one that we used and we used a BBC Micro I suppose it's in the category of the bleeding obvious as to why we in the BBC were going to use a BBC Micro but pretty well everybody else was doing that in Europe in the States they tended to use an Apple II but they were very limited because one important thing about the BBC Micro was that I suppose because it had input from broadcast engineers its video output was specifically designed to work on an ordinary power television which meant that with very little fiddling about it was possible to combine it with real video sometimes as an overlay more often actually just by switching between the two slightly dirtily but it did tend to work so interactive video was in fairly common use by the time we got to 1984 from the early 80s initially in the States there was a lot of interest a lot of point of sale stuff Mother Care produced video discs to tell people how to put up a baby buggy because apparently this is an extremely complicated process and required an interactive system to tell you how to do it my favourite was the Cardiac program where the user interface device was a dummy that you had to press on and this doctor came up on the screen and told you whether you'd kill the patient or not so that was quite sort of straightforward I jumped ahead of myself talking about why using the Micro hang on I'll come back to this one for use the Micro, yes PAL video timings sophisticated programming not just basic there was also the option of having loads of other different languages as some of you may know we ended up using a thing called BCPL which is always called a precursor of C which it sort of is it's similar in a lot of ways to see lots of interfaces and expandability and had the backing of the computer literacy project one important thing just to put in the back of your mind about the computer literacy project is at that point the government was subsidising the cost of computer hardware in schools ok why not use a standard player well I've already mentioned those first two, what we wanted to do there just wasn't enough space on floppy disks the idea in 1984 of having a hard drive attached to a home computer was actually nonsense even when Acorn finally produced what they called a Winchester I think it had 10 megabytes of storage and cost several thousand pounds just by itself so that was no good but more particularly we wanted to have a single disk solution you have this piece of kit you put one disk on, you press go and it happens and the final thing was all to do with full frame teletext because my initial thought had been to store all the information on the disk by filling the frames with teletext which it's technically possible to do and the University of London Audio Visual Centre actually did make a disk to test this out we were concerned about it being rather unstable particularly error correction broadcast teletext works on the assumption that you rotate the carousel every minute or so and if you get a glitch if you get a word wrong in the text next time around it'll get corrected and it's no big deal for telesoftware you ended up having to put in a lot more error correction and what we were finding was and you run the numbers the actual amount of data that you could store was dropping down every time you made it more and more rugged as you might expect Philips came up with a great idea to get around that which I'll come back to in a moment so forget that because we said it okay full frame teletext in that pulse width modulated signal on the video disk you had a left and right audio carrier and a video carrier and up here was 5.25 megahertz and that wasn't going to work before we kind of figured out how we might deal with it Philips came up with an interesting idea replace those audio carriers with a data carrier now I have to remind you when this is this is this is back in 1984 going on 1985 by now and there had been a start on CD-ROM by which I mean the physical carrier medium had been defined Philips and also Sony it's interesting actually video just tended to be pioneer and Philips it's all to do with who owns the pads for what and this idea was you have a channel which basically has the same kind of low level format as Philips were putting into this new CD-ROM format which was an error protected version of what was already on CD audio there's a lot of funny things going on on CD CD audio a lot of people think that CDs consist of land and pits that are noughts and wands but it's much more complicated than that and has things like 8-14 modulation and stuff and I won't go into that because I don't know enough about it but basically we were then told okay you can have this data channel and you can have three and a half kilobytes of error corrected data per frame of the video disc and what was more useful actually was that you don't lose the video so you got all this video all these 55,000 frames per side you could still use all of those or you can have a mixture which in the end is what we did we had some video that had audio and then we had some still frames that were instead of audio had all this data sitting underneath them and as I say we didn't use CD-ROM because it was coming in quite late there wasn't even a standardised filing system until 1986 when a bunch of engineers got together in a hotel at a resort called High Sierra and came up with the High Sierra format which eventually that took another year or so evolved into ISO 9660 and if you've been doing all this stuff long enough you'll get a headache every time somebody says ISO 9660 to you it's kind of one of those things it's like when I did engineering drawing I used to get a British standard I'd forgotten its number it's a mantra CD-ROM would have absolutely no scope for video whatsoever there wasn't enough data and at that time, long time before even JPEG the best you could hope for were 8 bit adaptive pallet images and on a single CD-ROM you'd get 2,200 of them and we wanted at least 10 times that so fortunately that wasn't going to work for us but it's still steam power back then getting the information from the schools involved posting out floppy disks actually I was going to bring one with me because I found one but then I thought now you guys you probably do know what a floppy disk looks like apparently those you're going to ask me if they're hard or soft sector next don't you? now they were 5.25 inch soft sector actually I don't think they ever had hard sector 5.25 5.25 inch so called floppy disks are in South Africa apparently colloquially known as stiffies however no, 5.25 inch so you basically it had a BBC micro or a research machines program on this disk for data gathering post them out to the schools schools fill in the information post them back there's no graphic user interface in common use at all one of my favourite little stories from the early days was we got some locals in in Ealing to try out a mouse on the BBC micro because they were quite easy to program you just look for the interrupts from the mouse and move a pointer around on the screen and I'd written the program to do that because everybody did and we're trying out watching people using the bird book stuff and various other pieces of software and my favourite was the man who was using the mouse whatever it was he was doing and it came down the screen and when it when he reached the bottom before the pointer did he did that and I can't blame him you know confronting with this strange, strange thing I mentioned press spacebar for next page because if you're old enough you'll remember the tyranny of that when they launched the BBC micro they got actually I've forgotten which poet it was it's the guy from Liverpool where the last line of every verse was now press return and that would then take you on to the next verse of the poem the equipment that was used for getting the maps and all the slides we asked people to send in slides was analogue of course it was a TELUSINI slide scanner a ranks and tell mark 3 if you care about it an analogue rostrum camera which was basically you just wouldn't believe the size and weight of this bloody thing it's like well it was a bit like that again only this is mounted up on a vertical rostrum pointing down and you're underneath it moving these things around with this half a tonne hanging above you I didn't realise until much later I came to start working with digitised versions of the maps just how irregular the scan of the camera was you're presenting it with an ordnance survey map which has a nice grid on it and when you actually look at the detail you find they're all kind of just shifted all over the place fortunately it was at least consistent between shots although it did change as they warm up the geometry of the image changes slightly and we still had some fun I was going to talk about a couple of things that we did I've mentioned the maps Dr Martin Porter who is famous for a really good open source algorithm for passing English and a few other languages as well if you're ever into dealing with user interface and need a passing algorithm look up the Porter algorithm because it's very easy to implement and he gives it away he devised the algorithms to enable the moving around and zooming in and out of maps and also when we decided we were going to do something with what we were calling surrogate walks he came up with a mechanism for that but what are we talking about we call them surrogate walks this is a bit like Google Street View and the idea was you go around somewhere and you stop at various places and in our case take eight photographs in a circle and then there's an algorithm to allow you to follow that on the screen as you do we'd pinch the idea of course to where from in a moment had to try and invent a couple of things one of the ways you could actually walk to the walks from inside a gallery so if you came through that door and turned around you kind of saw TARDIS like your way back in at one point once you come out you turn this is a standard thing you turn left to find some information lifts was my favourite one I had to go up and down in a tower block you walked into the lift and then you turned around and as you turned around you went up so then you walked out and then when you're up there and you walk into the lift and then turn around it's taken you back down again let's try and work these things actually seem to work seem to work quite well this is the inside of sorry the market square almost of Brecken and this is one particular set of eight photos that worked reasonably well when I tried to put them together into a continuous circle most of the time they don't so I have a great deal of respect for Google managing to do it but they did spend a lot more money on their camera equipment than we did part of it of course is that the aspect ratio of a standard 35mm steel frame is a bit wider than television 4x3 and I think we didn't quite click to that which is why we tend to lose bits off the edge if you ever get the chance to walk around back and keep an eye open for a bloke in a flat cap who looks a bit like Benny Hill he crops up all over the place he followed us around and there's about four or five occasions when you see him walking down the street grinning at us just don't mind for quite good fun and where did we get this idea from if you haven't seen this have a look early 1970s the architecture machine group at MIT they were they were asked by the American military to come up with a system to enable soldiers to practice invading somewhere so they decided they'd invade Aspen, Colorado I think it's probably a good place for a holiday and they basically mounted this was actually a bit Google Street view like they mounted several cameras on the top of a car and they drove down the middle of every street in Aspen, Colorado and that's what we saw we just tried to see how we could emulate it their system used either 8 or 16 video discs so that when you got to a junction in one direction the system with the computer that was driving it would then move other discs to the frames that you would get if you went off down the other directions you can find it on on YouTube it's worth a look the other thing we did was quite fun turns up in this little bit of computer graphics and yes the in-joke which you may have noticed is that is a real teapot in a computer generated gallery so the ones who were laughing obviously do computer graphics for the rest a teapot is what you always render to practice that was done on a Bosch FT-S 4000 a piece of kit that cost as much as a large car never mind a small car and was probably much less powerful than my mobile phone and I spent several weeks with a guy doing that the shape of the gallery is designed to minimize the number of images on easels that can be seen from any one point because if you ask it to render too many it just falls over that idea and actually the company who did it we got from Mike Olfield if you YouTube I think it's called pictures in the dark there's a video and there's a whole as a whole chunk of stuff where they wander around bits of a house and go down a corridor and stuff and that was what we saw and thought ah maybe that will solve our problem for this so Mike put us in touch with the company and so who did it and we used them the doomsday gallery was a way of exploring a way into the information other than a basic search mechanism free text or following a hierarchy with this in the end we only used it mostly for the photo set so you walk around different sections of the gallery covering different parts of culture and science and things but also you can get at some of the textual information high level overlooks at British economy and stuff like that I'd originally thought well a hierarchy to have the entire information something that was maybe like a space station that you wandered around and you came at the entrance and you went and looked at things and this started out seeming to be quite reasonable to do but the big problem is and this is what happens when you look at hierarchies the ground floor is almost empty it's only well this is on the assumption you start at the ground floor and work up as you go further up you get more information until when you get to the top that's where the real stuff in fact as a mechanism for accessing information it's a bit restrictive I think I called it the landscape of knowledge this idea of going into a space and wandering around it works beautifully if you like for a flat file kind of thing and you can extend from there so you could go into a hospital and then find out things of that kind but trying to put too much too much hierarchy into the basic landscape just unfortunately doesn't really seem to work okay what I was going to do was just look at briefly a few things that we've been accused of of inventing and then immediately shot down we didn't really invent anything we just came up with the things that we found with the help of a lot of other people but certainly outside of a few university projects at this point we were one of the first organizations to try things like interactive mapping different ways of data display for example there are bar charts where when you change parameters the bars actually move as you change the parameters there was a lot of oh I think we can try that and if it works let's put it in but had nothing really to go on at that particular point we were crowd sourcing albeit using the royal mail to the the children and others who were writing their 20 pages tele-text pages about their daily lives or the towns they were essentially they were like blogging the walks are a bit like street view the photo sets that we have and the photo competition that we ran to get material in from the public as well as what went with their pages they're a bit like Flickering and Instagram the main things that we lacked obviously having the internet instead of having to use the mail would have been wonderful probably have found by the time we got round to thinking about it and had probably the third meeting someone in California would have already done it and made a million dollars from it instant digital photography would be great also the ease with which you can keep the quality high with digital media is great I had a big problem with the Soriga walks which started life as a 35mm stills and had to be transferred into something in other words what they call 8-4 perf translation they had to be optically printed onto the movie 35mm which is the opposite way round we lost quite a lot of quality and if it was digital you just don't run into those problems wouldn't have had the storage problems it's not just a question of using the internet to get the stuff in we could distribute the thing on the internet use a browser there's now I'm really hoping that we're going to get a bit of stability because over time so much in interactive media has changed every time we think oh this is what we want to aim for then it changes something else happens and in the hardware age which I went through blood sweat tears up with things like CDI CD ROMs themselves and stuff we've now moved into a software age and the price of entry has dropped people are much more collaborative the kind of things not just open source hardware the kind of things that people will now work together on around the world almost without thinking all these kind of things would make stuff so much easier to do and we could keep updating it well we okay that's the thing I missed wiki in a sense as soon as you start updating it it potentially becomes a wiki ironically the big reason why there was not a second doomsday project an ordnance survey wanting £3,000 per map in royalties once the original project was out this is because the gas board would pay them £3,000 a map for a video disc that showed where the gas pipes were for the one video us to try we did start the process of coming up with future ones but we didn't manage that kind of trying to stop it disappearing it's in not too bad a state at the moment but you still can't look at all of it this was the piece as the observer said it when when Lloyd Grossman held up a video doomsday disc and said this was an example of digital obsolescence which is ironic of course because half of the project is analog the chameleon project which was the universities of Leeds and Michigan they used emulation they basically used an extension of the Bbem emulator which some of you may know they expanded that with the help of the guy who wrote it and they had a system where you could actually run the whole thing as it had looked originally I had an argument with them though because they took the video frames off the video disc noise and all they looked horrible and they said we want to recreate the user experience and I said that is absolute nonsense we want to recreate where material is available in a better quality you want the better quality one otherwise it all gets lost we ended up begging to differ but I got the National Archives to pay me to do the video side of it properly the thing that they didn't quite realize at Chameleon no matter how many times I told them that by taking the video disc and still framing it and grabbing the frame they were losing two megahertz of the bandwidth of the picture anyway because the doomsday players were specially designed to enable you to get the full 5 megahertz image off and you can imagine actually that 2 megahertz at the top 2 megahertz out of 5 is missing it's a lot of detail so the National Archives because Peter Armstrong gave them a copy they were obliged to preserve it it's quite a nice wheeze actually they're obliged by law to preserve artifacts in their possession so they asked me to do it so with a lot of help from the research we got some high quality dubs from what was closest and left of the original master tapes so there now copies of those in the BBC and at the National Archives a guy named Adrian Pierce who is sadly now dead off his own volition rewrote a PC interface for the whole thing and did an absolutely gorgeous job it was online for a while everybody just kind of forgot about any possible copyright problems because he did such a nice job then a poor guy got cancer and died within a couple of weeks and that just went I think there's a group of people who could figure out how to get around his copy protection it's another thing to bear in mind by the way don't let your developers copy protect things without telling you how to get into it and the final one really is 2011 25th anniversary the BBC decided they'd put it back online and asked the members of the public to update photos and text about the places where they lived and that you can still find if you go to bbc.co.uk slash doomsday I hate it, don't you hate it when these people on television say forward slash I kind of think what sort of person are you forward slash you're not going to use a backslash surely that's an escape character okay where was I bbc.co.uk escape from windows bbc.co.uk slash doomsday you can explore it I don't know how long it'll be there but it was there a couple of days ago and all I wanted to do then is to show that that's the motley crew who kind of ran it all at the end in a place called builton house in west ealing in fact and that's my younger brother over there on the left very important person I've mentioned Peter Armstrong but this man Roger Kelly was a project engineer in the bbc and he project managed the doomsday project which was actually the most difficult job because originally they wanted to me to do it and some senior engineer said we can't have him doing that he's not an engineer and actually I was delighted because managing a project of that size Roger had just the right temperament to shout at everybody until only he was blue in the face but they got the job done and thank you Roger he's still around somewhere he doesn't you know he lives down south but he does get a bit overlooked because I tend to do some presentations and Peter always gets the headline but no Roger's another guy thank you very much for for listening that's the lesson for this afternoon I'm happy to discuss questions or whatever do we have time for a few now or do you want to over drinks even better especially if I'm having a drink thank you very much