James Bailey Email & Phone Number

Manchester, England, United Kingdom

Altrincham

I was brought to Pixel Inspiration to shape their technical approach to creating Interactive Touchscreen content. I came with a large amount of experience in new and upcoming web based technologies that were only just starting to appear in high street installations.Pixel Inspiration already had a stable platform for distributing content across a large network of Digital Signage Players, my first task was to find a stable and reliable way to push interactive content through their trusted infrastructure.To keep up with a growing demand for interactive content, it was important to get the rest of the development team up to speed with the new technologies we were adopting. I was tasked with training up the development team and establishing a set of consistent coding approaches and best practices, whilst catering to an increasing diverse range of technical projects.Early on it was recognised that the development team were fixing a recurring set of issues across multiple projects. To counter this I developed a set of developer tools and project templates that could be rapidly built on top and served our most common project requirements. This addressed multiple issues but the main advantages were:1) Lead Developers could maintain a small set of templates and remove bugs/issues at source ready for future projects2) New Developers could review templates and be brought up to speed on our established best practices through simplified code samples. New Developers could contribute to live projects faster.3) Faster turn around on projects4) Reduced issues raised through the support teamAs the development team were able to turn around projects faster with greater stability, we had spare time to invest back into the team. I used this time to direct the development of new tools to optimise our workflow and save even more time. The main benefit for the developers was less time doing grunt work and more time on the interesting code/work that they loved.

Manchester

MeYouAndUs is currently developing a product called TILO, a flexible Digital Signage Platform for public locations such as Art Galleries. It is designed to be flexible and open to allow clients to grow and develop their own content, typically by inviting third party Artists on to the platform.My role as Technical Director has been to ensure that the platform is stable and easy to use, reducing the barriers required for Artists to integrate their content on to our screens. TILO has only been open to third party content in the last year but has already proved a huge success, with no strict hardware requirements we've seen everything from Mac Minis to Raspberry Pis integrated into the system, usually within a few minutes with no intervention from MeYouAndUs.MeYouAndUs is an Arts practice at heart and we are constantly experimenting with and creating new content. On a day by day basis I am overseeing the research and development of technical solutions to support new content, and as our installations are often digitally connected with the outside world I have to plan out the connecting frameworks and architecture.New content is lead by the creative vision, not by what can be easily achieved with the technical knowledge we've already acquired. This makes it a challenge to keep up and develop the solution required and often our R&D has to step up to meet the demand.In order to keep up with the creative requirements a broad range of technologies are made use of, in the last year along we have used Unity3d, OpenFrameworks, NodeJS, Socket.IO, HTML5, KnockoutJS, Bootstrap, DMX lighting, Bluetooth, PhoneGap, Xtion, Intel Perceptual Computing SDK, Flash/Flex, Raspberry Pi, Ninja Block, Python and Scala.This flexible approach to delivering technical solutions around the creative direction is why I am also in demand as a Consultant to other Media Studios and Creative Agencies.