At This happened in March, Jack from Schulze & Webb gave a presentation on the development of Olinda, a prototype commissioned by BBC Audio & Music Interactive R&D. Olinda has now arrived and it looks fantastic…

“Olinda is a prototype digital radio that has your social network built in, showing you the stations your friends are listening to. It’s customisable with modular hardware, and aims to provoke discussion on the future and design of radios for the home.”

“Six lights on Olinda show when a close friend is listening to the radio, using wifi and Radio Pop, the BBC’s website for sharing ‘now playing’ information. Each light is a button: you can tune in to listen along with them, discovering new stations via your social network.”

Additional hardware modules can be snapped on to the base unit . This allows further expansion of the radio through purchased modules or possibly consumer created hardware. Examples of possibly modules included in the pdf.

“The hardware interface is made a feature with sprung copper connectors, and magnets mounted in rounded guides pull the modules together to a solid whole. It’s kept visible behind a clear, orange cap, and begs to be used.”

Olinda has two dials to tune: the outer scroll stations alphabetically; the inner one scrolls only your most listened.

The process of research, design and development that Olinda went through is a really interesting story. Soon we will put up a video of the This happened talk, but additional information & design detail can be found in the pdf pamphlet.

Unfortunately they are not for sale as the BBC don’t sell consumer hardware, however…

“Olinda is a design prototype. Conventionally, the implementations of and protocols behind concepts like the hardware API, social sharing of listening and other novelties developed for this radio might attract intellectual property protection.

To encourage development of these ideas, the BBC has agreed to waive certain rights, following a pattern which has proved successful on the Web, there called the ‘Creative Commons Attribution License’. This licence allows for sharing and remixing of a work, provided the original author is credited in the derivative work. It means remixing is supported without requiring any lengthy negotiations or discussion.”

I’m really pleased that the BBC commissioned this work as S&W have done a really fine job. Creating it under a more open licence is even better.