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Euro ITV 2006 Special Issue

Introduction

 

Methods and Applications in Interactive Broadcasting

Euro ITV 2006 Special Issue

Konstantinos Chorianopoulos et al.

Interactive TV technology has been addressed in many previous works, but there is sparse research on the topic of interactive content broadcasting and how to support the production process. In this article, the interactive broadcasting process is broadly defined to include studio technology and digital TV applications at consumer set-top boxes. In particular, augmented reality studio technology employs smart-projectors as light sources and blends real scenes with interactive computer graphics that are controlled at end-user terminals. Moreover, TV producer-friendly multimedia authoring tools empower the development of novel TV formats. Finally, the support for user-contributed content raises the potential to revolutionize the hierarchical TV production process, by introducing the viewer as part of content delivery chain./p>

[Submitted: September 28th, 2006 | Published: September 24th, 2007 ]

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no. 1

 

Digital Illumination for Augmented Studios

Oliver Bimber et al.

Virtual studio technology plays an important role for modern television productions. Blue-screen matting is a common technique for integrating real actors or moderators into computer generated sceneries. Augmented reality offers the possibility to mix real and virtual in a more general context. This article proposes a new technological approach for combining real studio content with computer-generated information. Digital light projection allows a controlled spatial, temporal, chrominance and luminance modulation of illumination opening new possibilities for TV studios.

[Submitted: August 28th, 2006 | In Peer-Review: September 19th, 2006 | Resubmitted: September 20th, 2006 | Accepted: November 23rd, 2006 | Published: December 26th, 2006 ]

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no. 2

 

An Architecture for End-User TV Content Enrichment

P. Cesar et al.

This paper proposes an extension to the televisionwatching paradigm that permits an end-user to enrich broadcast content. Examples of this enriched content are: virtual edits that allow the order of presentation within the content to be changed or that allow the content to be subsetted; conditional text, graphic or video objects that can be placed to appear within content and triggered by viewer interaction; additional navigation links that can be added to structure how other users view the base content object. The enriched content can be viewed directly within the context of the TV viewing experience. It may also be shared with other users within a distributed peer group. Our architecture is based on a model that allows the original content to remain unaltered, and which respects DRM restrictions on content reuse. The fundamental approach we use is to define an intermediate content enhancement layer that is based on the W3C’s SMIL language. Using a pen-based enhancement interface, end-users can manipulate content that is saved in a home PDR setting. This paper describes our architecture and it provides several examples of how our system handles content enhancement. We also describe a reference implementation for creating and viewing enhancements.

[Submitted: June 21st, 2006 | In Peer-Review: July, 4th 2006 | Resubmitted: November 11th, 2006 | Accepted: November 23rd, 2006 | Published: January 5th, 2007 ]

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no. 3

 

MHP Oriented Interactive Augmented Reality System for Sports Broadcasting Environments

Igor G. Olaizola et al.

Television and movie images have been altered ever since it was technically possible. Nowadays embedding advertisements, or incorporating text and graphics in TV scenes, are common practice, but they can not be considered as integrated part of the scene. The introduction of new services for interactive augmented television is discussed in this paper. We analyse the main aspects related with the whole chain of augmented reality production.

Interactivity is one of the most important added values of the digital television: This paper aims to break the model where all TV viewers receive the same final image. Thus, we introduce and discuss the new concept of interactive augmented television, i. e. real time composition of video and computer graphics - e.g. a real scene and freely selectable images or spatial rendered objects - edited and customized by the end user within the context of the user's set top box and TV receiver.

We demonstrate a sample application introducing "Interactive Augmented Television" for sport broadcasts additionally with 3D virtual objects in order to enhance or alter the presentation of the match with a new interface. We also introduce a pure virtual world where the user can select the camera position.

[Submitted: July 2nd, 2006 | In Peer-Review: August 22nd, 2006 | Resubmitted: November 1st, 2006 | Accepted: January 3rd, 2007 | Published: June 8th, 2007 ]

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no. 4

 

Video Search: New Challenges in the Pervasive Digital Video Era

K. Pastra et al.

The explosion of multimedia digital content and the development of technologies that go beyond traditional broadcast and TV have rendered access to such content important for all end-users of these technologies. While originally developed for providing access to multimedia digital libraries, video search technologies assume now a more demanding role. In this paper, we attempt to shed light onto this new role of video search technologies, looking at the rapid developments in the related market, the lessons learned from state of art video search prototypes developed mainly in the digital libraries context and the new technological challenges that have risen. We focus on one of the latter, i.e., the development of cross-media decision mechanisms, drawing examples from REVEAL THIS, an FP6 project on the retrieval of video and language for the home user. We argue, that efficient video search holds a key to the usability of the new ”pervasive digital video” technologies and that it should involve cross-media decision mechanisms.

[Submitted: July 7th, 2006 | In Peer-Review: November 3rd, 2006 | Accepted: December 15th, 2006 | Published: May 31st, 2007]

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no. 5

 

How to Improve the Production Process for interactive TV with semi-formal Methods

Matthias Rauterberg et al.

The central question for this paper is how to improve the production process by closing the gap between industrial designers and software engineers of television(TV)-based User Interfaces (UI) in an industrial environment. Software engineers are highly interested whether one UI design can be converted into several fully functional UIs for TV products with different screen properties. The aim of the software engineers is to apply automatic layout and scaling in order to speed up and improve the production process. However, the question is whether a UI design lends itself for such automatic layout and scaling. This is investigated by analysing a prototype UI design done by industrial designers. In a first requirements study, industrial designers had created meta-annotations on top of their UI design in order to disclose their design rationale for discussions with software engineers. In a second study, five (out of ten) industrial designers assessed the potential of four different meta-annotation approaches. The question was which annotation method industrial designers would prefer and whether it could satisfy the technical requirements of the software engineering process. One main result is that the industrial designers preferred the method they were already familiar with, which therefore seems to be the most effective one although the main objective of automatic layout and scaling could still not be achieved.

[Submitted: July 10th, 2006 | In Peer-Review: August 20th, 2006 | Resubmitted: February 8th, 2007 | Accepted: March 22nd, 2007 | Published: June 8th, 2007 ]

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no. 6

 

Exploiting OSGi capabilities from MHP applications

Rebeca Redondo et al.

In this paper we introduce a cooperative environment between the Interactive Digital TV (IDTV) and home networking with the aim of allowing the interaction between interactive TV applications and the controllers of the in-home appliances in a natural way. More specifically, our proposal consists of merging MHP (Multimedia Home Platform), one of the main standard frameworks for IDTV, with OSGi (Open Service Gateway Initiative), the most widely used open platform to set up Residential Gateways. To overcome the radically different nature of these specifications the function-oriented MHP middleware and the service-oriented OSGi framework , we define a new kind of application, coined as XbundLET. Although this software bridge is suitable to enable the interaction between MHP and OSGi applications in both directions, we concretely focus on exposing our implementation experience in only one direction: from MHP to the OSGiworld.

[Submitted: June 21st, 2006 | In Peer-Review: May 4th, 2007 | Accepted: June 26th, 2007 | Published: August 9th, 2007 ]

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no. 7

 

Semi-Automated Creation of Converged iTV Services: From Macromedia Director Simulations to Services Ready for Broadcast

Emmanuel Tsekleves et al.

While sound and video may capture viewers′ attention, interaction can captivate them. This has not been available prior to the advent of Digital Television. In fact, what lies at the heart of the Digital Television revolution is this new type of interactive content, offered in the form of interactive Television (iTV) services.

On top of that, the new world of converged networks has created a demand for a new type of converged services on a range of mobile terminals (Tablet PCs, PDAs and mobile phones). This paper aims at presenting a new approach to service creation that allows for the semi-automatic translation of simulations and rapid prototypes created in the accessible desktop multimedia authoring package Macromedia Director into services ready for broadcast. This is achieved by a series of tools that de-skill and speed-up the process of creating digital TV user interfaces (UI) and applications for mobile terminals.

The benefits of rapid prototyping are essential for the production of these new types of services, and are therefore discussed in the first section of this paper. In the following sections, an overview of the operation of content, service, creation and management sub-systems is presented, which illustrates why these tools compose an important and integral part of a system responsible of creating, delivering and managing converged broadcast and telecommunications services. The next section examines a number of metadata languages candidates for describing the iTV services user interface and the schema language adopted in this project. A detailed description of the operation of the two tools is provided to offer an insight of how they can be used to de-skill and speed-up the process of creating digital TV user interfaces and applications for mobile terminals. Finally, representative broadcast oriented and telecommunication oriented converged service components are also introduced, demonstrating how these tools have been used to generate different types of services.

[Submitted: July 7th, 2006 | In Peer-Review: December 21st, 2006 | Accepted: July 4th, 2007 | Published: July 20th, 2007 ]

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no. 8

 

Video Composer and Live Video Conductor: Future Professions for the Interactive Digital Broadcasting Industry

Richard Wages et al.

Innovations in hardware and network technologies lead to an exploding number of non-interrelated parallel media streams. Per se this does not mean any additional value for consumers. Broadcasting and advertisement industries have not yet found new formats to reach the individual user with their content.

In this work we propose and describe a novel digital broadcasting framework, which allows for the live staging of (mass) media events and improved consumer personalisation. In addition new professions for future TV production workflows which will emerge are described, namely the ′video composer′ and the ′live video conductor′.

[Submitted: July 17th, 2006 | In Peer-Review: December 14th, 2006 | Accepted: April 11th, 2007 | Published: July 9th, 2007 ]

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