BBC offers future insight

The exhibition has many hands-on features

FutureWorld, the BBC's interactive travelling exhibition offering a free look into the future of broadcasting and technology, has opened in Northern Ireland.

The show is at Belfast's Waterfront Hall.

FutureWorld has been designed to give people an insight into new technology and at the same time as having fun learning about some of the technical wizardry behind their favourite programmes.

It also features some of the models, artefacts and brand new technologies used in recent popular BBC programmes such as Walking With Dinosaurs.

Futureworld offers an insight into future technology

Visitors are also able to experience new BBC initiatives including Beyond 2000.

FutureWorld Project Director, David Vercoe said: "Research shows that few people have an appreciation of how dramatic and exciting the next decade in broadcasting will be beyond 2000.

"This will give visitors to FutureWorld first hand knowledge of a world where the consumer has total control of all the possible services and how and when they want to use them."

Based on months of technological experimentation and using archive material from Fawlty Towers, Animal Hospital, plus news, sport, natural history, education and popular and serious music, Beyond 2000 looks into a future when words like 'television', 'radio', 'computer' and 'telephone' will have little meaning.

This is the world of convergence, which experts envisage is only between five and ten years away.

FutureWorld visitors are also offered hands-on experience of plasma screens, digital audio broadcasting systems, interactive television and the up-to-the-minute communications technology that will make convergence possible in a "living room of the future".

It also offers features such as a "virtual pint in a virtual Queen Vic".

Gaming enthusiasts can pit their wits against the FutureWorld Challenge, a state-of-the-art game specially adapted for FutureWorld, using five screens, three cameras, four computers and a virtual Peter Snow in the chair.

Younger visitors might prefer CD-Rom fun with the Teletubbies and the new PlayStation game and old favourites such as Pingu and Noddy.

As well as daily broadcasts from familiar presenters around the nations and regions of the UK, BBC stars and personalities will be visiting FutureWorld to present radio and television programmes, master-classes and workshops.