EXPERIMEDIA: Innovate in New Media - a multi-venue experimentation service supporting technology innovation through new forms of social interaction and user experience

New media applications and services are revolutionising social interaction and user experience in both society and in wide ranging industry sectors. The rapid emergence of pervasive human and environment sensing technologies, novel immersive presentation devices and high performance, globally connected network and cloud infrastructures is generating huge opportunities for application providers, service provider and content providers. These new applications are driving convergence across devices, clouds, networks and services, and the merging of industries, technology and society. Yet the developers of such systems face many challenges in understanding how to optimise their solutions (Quality of Service - QoS) to enhance user experience (Quality of Experience - QoE) and how their disruptive innovations can be introduced into the market with appropriate business models. In this report, we present the results of a new multi-disciplinary collaborative approach to product and service innovation that brings together users, technology and live events in a series of experiments conducted in real world settings. Through experimentation we have explored a broad range of technical, societal and economic challenges faced by technology providers each aiming to create and exploit new multimedia value chains in markets such as leisure and tourism, cultural and heritage, and sports science and training. The experiments highlight the features of multimedia systems and the future opportunities for companies, as the Internet continues to transition towards the increasingly connected world of Internet of Things and Big Data. We know that putting user values at the heart of design decisions and evaluation is the key to success, and that long term benefits to providers of technology, services and content must derive from enhanced user experience. Engaging users in real-world settings to co-design and assess how technology can be used is now more important than testing how technology will be operated. We have only scratched the surface of possibility in novel networked multimedia systems yet we believe that the individual and collective results in the report are significant as they are grounded in real-world evidence. A new way of conducting research and innovation has been created that maximises the potential for commercial exploitation and societal impact. We think this is extremely important and when adopted will lead to greater benefits for all