Towards the architecture of an instructional multimedia database

The applicability of multimedia databases in education may be extended if they can serve multiple target groups, leading to affordable costs per unit for the user. In this contribution, an approach is described to build generic multimedia databases to serve that purpose. This approach is elaborated within the ODB Project ('Instructional Design of an Optical DataBase'); the term optical refers to the use of optical storage media to hold the audiovisual components. The project aims at developing a database in which a hypermedia encyclopedia is combined with instructional multimedia applications for different target groups at different educational levels. The architecture of the Optical Database will allow for switching between application types while working (for instance from tutorial instruction via the encyclopedia to a simulation and back). For instruction, the content of the database is thereby organized around so-called standard instruction routes: one route per target group. In the project, the teacher is regarded as the manager of instruction.\ud \ud From that perspective, the database is primarily organized as a teaching facility. Central to the research is the condition that the architecture of the Optical Database has to enable teachers to select and tailor instruction routes to their needs in a way that is perceived as logical and easy to use

An interactive multimedia learning environment for VLSI built with COSMOS

This paper presents Bigger Bits, an interactive multimedia learning environment that teaches students about VLSI within the context of computer electronics. The system was built with COSMOS (Content Oriented semantic Modelling Overlay Scheme), which is a modelling scheme that we developed for enabling the semantic content of multimedia to be used within interactive systems

Multimedia delivery in the future internet

The term “Networked Media” implies that all kinds of media including text, image, 3D graphics, audio and video are produced, distributed, shared, managed and consumed on-line through various networks, like the Internet, Fiber, WiFi, WiMAX, GPRS, 3G and so on, in a convergent manner [1]. This white paper is the contribution of the Media Delivery Platform (MDP) cluster and aims to cover the Networked challenges of the Networked Media in the transition to the Future of the Internet. Internet has evolved and changed the way we work and live. End users of the Internet have been confronted with a bewildering range of media, services and applications and of technological innovations concerning media formats, wireless networks, terminal types and capabilities. And there is little evidence that the pace of this innovation is slowing. Today, over one billion of users access the Internet on regular basis, more than 100 million users have downloaded at least one (multi)media file and over 47 millions of them do so regularly, searching in more than 160 Exabytes1 of content. In the near future these numbers are expected to exponentially rise. It is expected that the Internet content will be increased by at least a factor of 6, rising to more than 990 Exabytes before 2012, fuelled mainly by the users themselves. Moreover, it is envisaged that in a near- to mid-term future, the Internet will provide the means to share and distribute (new) multimedia content and services with superior quality and striking flexibility, in a trusted and personalized way, improving citizens’ quality of life, working conditions, edutainment and safety. In this evolving environment, new transport protocols, new multimedia encoding schemes, cross-layer inthe network adaptation, machine-to-machine communication (including RFIDs), rich 3D content as well as community networks and the use of peer-to-peer (P2P) overlays are expected to generate new models of interaction and cooperation, and be able to support enhanced perceived quality-of-experience (PQoE) and innovative applications “on the move”, like virtual collaboration environments, personalised services/ media, virtual sport groups, on-line gaming, edutainment. In this context, the interaction with content combined with interactive/multimedia search capabilities across distributed repositories, opportunistic P2P networks and the dynamic adaptation to the characteristics of diverse mobile terminals are expected to contribute towards such a vision. Based on work that has taken place in a number of EC co-funded projects, in Framework Program 6 (FP6) and Framework Program 7 (FP7), a group of experts and technology visionaries have voluntarily contributed in this white paper aiming to describe the status, the state-of-the art, the challenges and the way ahead in the area of Content Aware media delivery platforms

An Immersive Telepresence System using RGB-D Sensors and Head Mounted Display

We present a tele-immersive system that enables people to interact with each other in a virtual world using body gestures in addition to verbal communication. Beyond the obvious applications, including general online conversations and gaming, we hypothesize that our proposed system would be particularly beneficial to education by offering rich visual contents and interactivity. One distinct feature is the integration of egocentric pose recognition that allows participants to use their gestures to demonstrate and manipulate virtual objects simultaneously. This functionality enables the instructor to ef- fectively and efficiently explain and illustrate complex concepts or sophisticated problems in an intuitive manner. The highly interactive and flexible environment can capture and sustain more student attention than the traditional classroom setting and, thus, delivers a compelling experience to the students. Our main focus here is to investigate possible solutions for the system design and implementation and devise strategies for fast, efficient computation suitable for visual data processing and network transmission. We describe the technique and experiments in details and provide quantitative performance results, demonstrating our system can be run comfortably and reliably for different application scenarios. Our preliminary results are promising and demonstrate the potential for more compelling directions in cyberlearning.Comment: IEEE International Symposium on Multimedia 201

Quality of experience driven control of interactive media stream parameters

In recent years, cloud computing has led to many new kinds of services. One of these popular services is cloud gaming, which provides the entire game experience to the users remotely from a server, but also other applications are provided in a similar manner. In this paper we focus on the option to render the application in the cloud, thereby delivering the graphical output of the application to the user as a video stream. In more general terms, an interactive media stream is set up over the network between the user's device and the cloud server. The main issue with this approach is situated at the network, that currently gives little guarantees on the quality of service in terms of parameters such as available bandwidth, latency or packet loss. However, for interactive media stream cases, the user is merely interested in the perceived quality, regardless of the underlaying network situation. In this paper, we present an adaptive control mechanism that optimizes the quality of experience for the use case of a race game, by trading off visual quality against frame rate in function of the available bandwidth. Practical experiments verify that QoE driven adaptation leads to improved user experience compared to systems solely taking network characteristics into account

Who am I talking with? A face memory for social robots

In order to provide personalized services and to develop human-like interaction capabilities robots need to rec- ognize their human partner. Face recognition has been studied in the past decade exhaustively in the context of security systems and with significant progress on huge datasets. However, these capabilities are not in focus when it comes to social interaction situations. Humans are able to remember people seen for a short moment in time and apply this knowledge directly in their engagement in conversation. In order to equip a robot with capabilities to recall human interlocutors and to provide user- aware services, we adopt human-human interaction schemes to propose a face memory on the basis of active appearance models integrated with the active memory architecture. This paper presents the concept of the interactive face memory, the applied recognition algorithms, and their embedding into the robot’s system architecture. Performance measures are discussed for general face databases as well as scenario-specific datasets

Service oriented interactive media (SOIM) engines enabled by optimized resource sharing

In the same way as cloud computing, Software as a Service (SaaS) and Content Centric Networking (CCN) triggered a new class of software architectures fundamentally different from traditional desktop software, service oriented networking (SON) suggests a new class of media engine technologies, which we call Service Oriented Interactive Media (SOIM) engines. This includes a new approach for game engines and more generally interactive media engines for entertainment, training, educational and dashboard applications. Porting traditional game engines and interactive media engines to the cloud without fundamentally changing the architecture, as done frequently, can enable already various advantages of cloud computing for such kinds of applications, for example simple and transparent upgrading of content and unified user experience on all end-user devices. This paper discusses a new architecture for game engines and interactive media engines fundamentally designed for cloud and SON. Main advantages of SOIM engines are significantly higher resource efficiency, leading to a fraction of cloud hosting costs. SOIM engines achieve these benefits by multilayered data sharing, efficiently handling many input and output channels for video, audio, and 3D world synchronization, and smart user session and session slot management. Architecture and results of a prototype implementation of a SOIM engine are discussed