Interactive Multimedia

Interactive Multimedia summarises the effort to provide novel user experiences, while interacting with digital multimedia contents. Multimedia applications have to incorporate user interaction mechanisms, multimedia presentations, rendering capabilities, easy development, etc. The design of the application becomes even more complex imagining scenarios of users interacting through different devices with the application. But especially the seamless integration of technical environment into multimedia applications can make experiencing multimedia a great experience.

MDCS - Multimodal Interfaces & Multimedia

MDCS scenario

MDCS stands for Multimodal Delivery and Control System. The MDCS Open Source project provides a component based implementation to enable the development of interactive multimedia applications, which are designed to allow the user to interact with the application through several devices available in the users immediate environment. The optimal selection of devices is assured through the functionality of the MDCS. Multimedia Content and Controls for the application can be defined and will be "rendered" dynamically based on the presentation description, media content descriptions, device capability description and user situation. Changes in the user situation can be reacted on and dynamically adapted to (e.g. a user leaves the room, a video watched on a screen in the room can be transferred to a mobile device).

The target applications are mobile services in novel IP Multimedia (IMS) communication systems, as well Web applications (current implementation effort is focussed on IMS systems due to the nature of the initiating project). Just to name a few application where the MDCS could bring advanced experiences for the multimedia users:

Example Scenario

The current implementation of the MDCS focuses on adapting the rendering part of a multimodal interface, in particular by deciding about the distribution of a media presentation to the available devices, as well a transferring a media presentation from one to another device. As indicated in the illustration, users are typically surrounded with some devices, such as HIFI and TV. The user for the example scenario (Consuelo) is staying in a hotel. She has a subscription with a Video-on-Demand service and uses her mobile phone to select a movie. Because there is an HD TV screen in Consuelo’s room, the MDCS decides to deliver the movie in two parts:
  1. audio and video of the movie on the television and
  2. user interface for interacting with the VoD service on Consuelo’s mobile device.
When Consuelo leaves her room, she decides to keep on watching the movie and uses the controls on her phone to transfer the video part of the presentation from the TV to her mobile phone.

Watch the video on the right to see a demo of the scenario.