NEM SUMMIT 2020

Dr. Mikel Zorrilla, Director of Digital Media at Vicomtech, has presented his paper “A Novel production Workflow and Toolset for Opera Co-creation Towards Enhanced Societal Inclusion of People”

The NEM Summit is an international conference and exhibition focused on Media, Content and Creativity fields, which has been held since 2008. Over the years, the NEM Summit has grown to become a relevant annual event, providing attendees with a key opportunity to meet and network with prominent stakeholders, access up-to-date information, discover the latest technology and market trends, identify research and business opportunities and find partners for upcoming EU-funded calls for projects.

Dr. Mikel Zorrilla has presented his paper “A Novel production Workflow and Toolset for Opera Co-creation Towards Enhanced Societal Inclusion of People”, based on the use case of TRACTION, the European project on Opera co-creation for a social transformation. The motivations for carrying out this ambitious project were outlined, and covered topics such as existing inequality, the need to express “European Values” through culture so as to preserve European cultural tradition and heritage, the fact that opera consumers tend to be people of determined economical characteristics, and the danger of opera becoming a symbol of European inequality. The main challenge of this initiative is to explore new ideas in co-creation and participatory art and release opera from its form, language and aesthetics by embracing new technologies. Moreover, the vision and the objectives of the project were highlighted.

His presentation finished with a description of the TRACTION toolset, which consists of the Media Vault, the performance engine and the immersive installation. The Media Vault allows the storage of a heterogeneous group of media objects and enables synchronised communication between users over the uploaded content for conversation and co-creation. In addition, it includes a function for generating stories which are based on the stored content, meeting a strong user-interface accessibility requirement for supporting people with cognitive and sensory disabilities. As for the performance engine, it sets a communication infrastructure deployed at the theatre or in the rehearsal rooms. It enriches the live performance by orchestrating the stage in real-time, and it allows remote participants to both see the show and to contribute to it. This communication infrastructure does not only enrich the show, but also enables synchronized communication between the actors and spectators. Lastly, the immersive installation includes both the authoring tools and the rendering engines for deploying immersive and interactive experiences in the form of capsules or radically new Opera productions. This environment will enable static and moveable installations, pushing the boundaries of immersive media consumption, and will also enable a remote browser-based experience.

Also speaking at the conference was consortium member Anderson Simiscuka (DCU), who presented his paper “Performance Analysis of Multi-Source Wireless Multimedia Content Delivery”. The paper and PowerPoint presentation are available for download in the UAB DDD, an open-source, digital asset repository. They can also be accessed on the Resources section of our website.