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1956-2001
ROYSTRINGER“One of the most brilliant minds in the interactive world”
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O F BH R I T I S H
and you’re kind of interacting with them. e talked of e-commerce and the gills and was opened by Lord some of the world’s biggest companies “That’s great but it’s just pushing touching the souls of Internet Puttnam. This was certainly one of the beating a path to his door to bring his pixels around. It’s still early days with users in the same breath. He most successful Interactive events that creativity and inspiration to their new
Magic Squirrel, but it’s a shopping mall conceived of the Web in BAFTA has ever held. media problems. The work that he has
terms of Euclidean geome- Two people – his mother and Ted done for Volkswagen and MTV as well ed by us. The way they interact will be tries and n-dimensional hypercubes - Nelson, the inventor of HyperText and as his earlier work with medical pro-
where some of the characters are creat-
programmed, but the key thing is that you can actually buy stuff. Or there may be places where you can get infor- mation, or a cinema where you can show all sorts of content, even whole movies. The idea is almost limitless.”
Working out of Giant Films, in part- nership with producer Nick O’Hagan, Dixon sees Magic Squirrel as a fun venture that may in time become a lucrative sideline. But even if it does not it is a novel way of showcasing the creativity Giant Films bring to their feature films.
“We’re a film company,” Dixon adds, “we’re content providers, but we’ve
just bought an edit suite which will use Final Cut Pro, we’ve got DV cameras. So although film is our core busi- ness we’re mov- ing into short form content in all sorts of ways.
“As we make short form stuff we can just load it up onto that, and build up a library for our- selves. But we
also conceived Magic Squirrel to be product placement heaven.
“We don’t need to sell any stock ourselves – that can be done through companies like Amazon – because effectively all we’re doing is recom- mending things.
“So you can come and enjoy the jokes and the characters, but you can also get an idea of some of the cool prod- ucts that are around. It’s just like entering a scripted, virtual world.” ■ Anwar Brett
www.magicsquirrel.com
and the biggest companies in the world beat a path to his door. He wanted to turn designers into programmers - and vice-versa. This was Roy Stringer.
One of the most brilliant minds in the interactive world was tragically lost from us in the middle of February. Roy Stringer, an incredibly enthusiastic member of BAFTA’s Interactive Entertainment committee, died sudden- ly as a result of a brain hemorrhage.
I first met Roy at the Edinburgh Inside Multimedia Conference about 5 years ago, where we were both speak- ing. I listened to his presentation from the wings and was blown
away by his vision and revo-
lutionary concept in new
media design, and even more
by his sheer passion for what
he was talking about.
Immediately afterwards we
went out for dinner and
talked and talked for hours. I
felt like I’d known him for
years – and I became lucky
enough to be involved with many of the areas of his professional life on a regu- lar basis.
Roy was invited to join the BAFTA Interactive Entertainment Committee following a successful stint as a juror one year, which he had really enjoyed and yet given feedback on how to improve the process. Despite the meet- ings being held in London, he travelled down from his home town of Liverpool every month and was always very sup- portive of BAFTA’s commitment to the whole interactive world and conver- gence between entertainment, technology and education.
His energy and reluctance to compromise made for wonder- ful committee meetings and he was always keen to do more. He chaired an event at BAFTA pro- moting the use of new media entertainment skills to promote learning, which was packed to
Hypermedia in the ’60s who foresaw that films and entertainment would merge with computers over twenty years ago, inspired him.
Roy’s love of computers, technolo- gy and learning started when he was 12 years old, when as he said, “The most
jects like Immunology and the develop- ment of Cytofocus for detection of can- cerous cells, have won him and his team many awards over the years.
Much of his work was focused on a revolutionary concept of navigation through the new media maze with something he called a Navihedron that meant that no piece of information was more than 3 clicks away. He was in the middle of an incredibly exciting major Navihedron-based collaboration with the famous physicist and author of A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking. This was Hawking’s Virtual
Universe, an online realtime 3D envi- ronment to explain the principles of theoretical physics. We can only hope that all his work on this will not be wasted and that it will be published at some
point in the future.
Roy had an international reputation
for his pioneering multimedia work - but always saw his work in the context of Liverpool. He was poised to become a leading player in the multimedia future of the city through his work with the Foundation for Art & Creative Technology (FACT) establishing a won- derful Arts Centre. He was totally com- mitted to making Liverpool the ‘silicon valley’ of the UK and despite many, many requests to live and work in the US or London, he was never tempted.
But as Peter Fowler from Liverpool John Moores Univeristy so eloquently said “his genius - and that’s what it was - shone so brightly at times that his strengths always overwhelmed his idio- syncracies. He was a joy and an inspira- tion to work with.”
Roy is survived by his partner, Ruth, and by his son, Paul. ■
Sue Thexton
important strange event in my life was being woken at 6am by my mother, and being sat in front of BBC Open University with instructions to ‘never be bored again’. Since then my life has been a constant process of connecting ideas from every area of arts, science and technology.”
He was hooked on learning forever more. His formal education never got beyond secondary school but his thirst for knowledge in every field of life, be it science, art or philosophy was never quenched. He later went back into edu-
cation as his passion for learn- ing brought him to the Learning Method Unit of the Liverpool John Moores University. This was later spun-off as an independent business, which became Amaze Ltd in 1997.
His work there was inter- nationally renowned with