A new kind of audience participation

So this is touted as being for armchair fans everywhere... and for WOMEN everywhere. (OK so now I'm gonna get stoned by those of the femme species that LOVE sitting through games with the girls or with their man... apologies to you, just speaking for me, and for me, sitting through some live sports matches is a unique kind of death craving experience).

BT have just announced a new technology developed to remove the middle man, so to speak, and to allow audience reaction and physiology guide the selection of 'highlights'. The researchers are David Chatting, Matt Brotherton and Li-Qun Xu and together with research centre head Richard Jacobs, they have developed a new technology that thinks like a football fan and picks out the best bits of a game, and then presents the user with an edited highlights package.

"The computer has no idea about footballs, goal posts, lines etc. It picks out all these events by listening to the crowd and seeing how often the camera angle is changed. And it has absolutely no understanding of the offside rule.

"If you've ever been in another room while a match is on you'll get an idea how it works. You hear the volume rise with the crowd and you know something interesting has happened."

jeremy from loosewire suggests this app probably won't work for tennis, chess or cricket. Maybe the way forward would be to encourage a new kind of rowdiness - certainly to cricket, which barely ever transcends stultifying tedium and you'd think that the sheer surprise that anything was happening on the field would be enough to rouse a response.

But what I'm really wondering is - can the technology be applied to jelly wrestling? How cool would that be.

techgirl peacing out, getting down and asking the real questions. Yeah baby.