If any one is in the Surrey area today and fancys having a nose at the BBC's R&D department at Kingswood Warren then you are in luck. They have having an open weekend this weekend, I went on Saturday and they are open again from 10:00-16:00 again on Sunday.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/heritage2004/index.shtml

The R&D department is house in an old mansion, looks like a very unusual place to work. You don't get to see much of where the actual work goes on, mostly you get to see the downstairs reception rooms of the house. You do get to see a demo of their free-d virtual studio setup, which was intesting (lots of SGI horsepower and a funky blue screen that wasn't blue):




Yes, they even have their own croquet lawn.










Those odd black and white targets on the ceiling are so the camera can tell where it is and where it is pointing (the camera has another small camera on the top of it to look at the ceiling).


That is the funky blue screen, it appears grey until you shine blue LEDs at it. The cloth has lots of tiny glass beads so it reflects the blue light from the LEDs on the camera back at the camera. In those two pictures of the screen, in both cases the blue LEDs are on, but in one picture the screen isn't blue because my camera was off axis compared to where the camera with the LEDs on it was pointing.






I'm amazed the BBC have never been forced to sell off this site. It sits in the middle of a large, exclusive, private estate. The 100 acres of land it sits on must be worth at least 80 million UK pounds...

P.S. when you were out of the bright lights that studio was very dark, thank goodness for 3200 ISO/ASA