14/05/2016 Click - Short Edition

For many, the ultimate test of human endurance.

A physically and mentally draining feat that

Now, imagine doing one four times in four days, in a desert.

This is the Ultramarathon, a 150 mile long race through the

Namibian desert in some of the most difficult conditions on the planet.

And in this case, the guide was a smart phone.

You are experiencing sensory deprivation.

I had headphones in, so I couldn't really hear anything.

All you've got is the feeling under foot, you're never too sure

Running through uncertain desert terrain is what Simon has spent

He has a degenerative eye disease that has left him blind since age

17, but he has never let himself be defined by his lack of sight.

After proposing to his girlfriend halfway up a cliff face, he took

up running in a field behind his house.

He moved to the path and onto the road,

using a range of objects, distances and undulations to guide

I do want to be one of those people...

The things that you memorise, those are amazing.

You would not imagine, if you were running towards me,

If you make a mistake, you are running into the cars.

A lot of people aren't willing to be that close.

Yes, I have been hit by a van and stuff, but I carry on running.

His amazing feat has been made possible by technology

which allows his feet to stay where they should be running.

He originally used a run tracking up.

The team here have helped to develop and adapt it specifically

The difficulty with the desert is that there is not a normal path.

You can't just go along the street with Google Maps.

There is no mobile network in the desert, so it was very important

to make it work without mobile network, just running on a GPS.

It helps him not to get off track and guide him

If you go too far to the right, it's a high-pitched beep, and to the

It increases in frequency the further left or right you get off

What happens if we hit start right now?

We're too far to the left of the desert?

This app has been a key component in allowing Simon to achieve his

dream of competing without a guide or this lovely fella.

When I was in the open plan desert, it worked fantastically.

I had a real sense of independence, it was the first chance I had to

There was one point where I just started to cry because I couldn't

believe that, for the first time in my life, I could do this alone.

All thanks to this app and these beeps that were getting me

He made it almost 100 miles into the race

before having to pull out because of the terrain and extreme heat.

If anything, the disappointment has made him

As you know, we love a good world first on this programme,

Last year, we filmed and edited an entire programme using

But mobiles can be really useful for journalists, helping them report

LJ Rich has been to the Mobile Journalism Conference in Dublin to

check out the latest tools of the trade.

It is not everyday you see mobile journalists sitting still,

but here are around 700 of them transfixed

a convention for those who want to improve their

The exhibition in the next room shows off the next generation

of mobile gadgetry soon to be snapped up by these early adopters.

This prosumer accessory ecosystem centres around one fact -

many of the latest smartphones can shoot at extremely high resolution

but can't yield a polished result without a bit of help.

Simple things that elevate smartphone footage include lighting.

These flexible LED mats are easy to control, though pricey unless

Any kind of steady light source improves your video.

Even battery-powered fairy lights are better than nothing.

Simply holding a smartphone steady makes footage look good,

and many holders are on display to give broadcasters a helping hand.

Some solutions are more cumbersome than others.

Padcaster turns your iPad into a mobile production studio,

essentially a frame that connects various accessories to your tablet,

including lenses, lights and microphones.

Another holder has also caught my eye, or should that be ear?

A one-handed mobile grip with an integrated microphone input.

Getting decent sound so you can play it back is a problem, and a lot of

manufacturers are trying to address that, including IK Multimedia,

which means you can plug things like radio microphones straight in.

This works with any smartphone, although sound records

Mobiles just don't like recording more than one channel

As most broadcasters record both the person speaking and background noise

One company attempting to address this is Sennheiser,

who's betting on 360 video and VR becoming more popular.

This is their third prototype of a fully 360-degree sound mic not

The processing is done afterwards, from mono and stereo through to

fully immersive 3D sound depending on your preference.

More affordable is this app, Mavis, which puts a pro-camera experience

inside an iPhone, including the complexity

a pro camera offers, which may be off-putting to novice users.

Far from a simple point-and-shoot, the app gives access to manual

controls like white balance, focus pulling and exposure adjustment.

Being able to tweak settings can make for arty and therefore

polished shots for those who fancy climbing up the learning curve.

It is expensive for an app, but cheap compared to

There is currently no single solution to filming

broadcast quality footage with a mobile phone,

although if the appetite for digital storytelling continues

to spread, it won't be long before smartphone manufacturers themselves

want a piece of the prosumer accessory action.

I wonder whether you spotted the fact that that entire report

The first annual robot art competition aims to discover

Teams from around the world have entered

and have one simple task - to create the next robotic Rubens - and I'm

The founder of the competition is Andrew Conru.

We know robots can perfectly recreate an image

What is the point of a robot art competition?

First, it is very difficult to get a robot to paint something perfectly.

An inkjet printer can create something stunningly precise,

but when it comes to using a physical brush and paint,

it is a lot more tricky and there is a lot more nuance.

The idea behind it is trying to see what is the process between an

Getting the robots to do this, and artificial intelligence

There are different teams and robots using different pieces of software.

Can you give us an idea how they work?

How are the robots creating these images?

We have 15 teams from seven countries, and each of

them have taken a different approach on how to create an artwork.

Perhaps the majority of them start with some sort of photograph that

Then the software tends to parse the image, find different regions

it wants to have different colours, figures out what layers it needs to

do first, then sends those commands to the robot arm that will try to

It is a whole spectrum in terms of complete automatic software to

something that is more teamwork with a human designer.

Our goal was to have every robot have a physical brush and dip it

But we realised art has evolved in which there is anywhere

from an inkjet printer to a plotter system all the way to what was

We have been flexible this year in terms of what constitutes

In future years, we will be more stringent

and try to keep all of the teams using a similar type of materials.

The full length version is on iPlayer right now.