MediaSync: Handbook on Multimedia Synchronization

This book provides an approachable overview of the most recent advances in the fascinating field of media synchronization (mediasync), gathering contributions from the most representative and influential experts. Understanding the challenges of this field in the current multi-sensory, multi-device, and multi-protocol world is not an easy task. The book revisits the foundations of mediasync, including theoretical frameworks and models, highlights ongoing research efforts, like hybrid broadband broadcast (HBB) delivery and users' perception modeling (i.e., Quality of Experience or QoE), and paves the way for the future (e.g., towards the deployment of multi-sensory and ultra-realistic experiences). Although many advances around mediasync have been devised and deployed, this area of research is getting renewed attention to overcome remaining challenges in the next-generation (heterogeneous and ubiquitous) media ecosystem. Given the significant advances in this research area, its current relevance and the multiple disciplines it involves, the availability of a reference book on mediasync becomes necessary. This book fills the gap in this context. In particular, it addresses key aspects and reviews the most relevant contributions within the mediasync research space, from different perspectives. Mediasync: Handbook on Multimedia Synchronization is the perfect companion for scholars and practitioners that want to acquire strong knowledge about this research area, and also approach the challenges behind ensuring the best mediated experiences, by providing the adequate synchronization between the media elements that constitute these experiences

Multimedia data capture with multicast dissemination for online distance learning

Distance Learning Environments (DLEs) are elusive to define, difficult to successfully implement and costly due to their proprietary nature. With few open-source solutions, organizations are forced to invest large amounts of their resources in the procurement and support of proprietary products. Once an organization has chosen a particular solution, it becomes prohibitively expensive to choose another path later in the development process. The resolution to these challenges is realized in the use of open-standards, non-proprietary solutions. This thesis explores the multiple definitions of DLEs, defines metrics of successful implementation and develops open-source solutions for the delivery of multimedia in the Distance Learning Environment. Through the use of the Java Media Framework API, multiple tools are created to increase the transmission, capture and availability of multimedia content. Development of this technology, through the use of case studies, leaves a legacy of lectures and knowledge on the Internet to entertain and enlighten future generations.http://archive.org/details/multimedidatcapt109456185US Navy (USN) autho

Highly Interactive Web-Based Courseware

Zukünftige Lehr-/Lernprogramme sollen als vernetzte Systeme die Lernenden befähigen, Lerninhalte zu erforschen und zu konstruieren, sowie Verständnisschwierigkeiten und Gedanken in der Lehr-/Lerngemeinschaft zu kommunizieren. Lehrmaterial soll dabei in digitale Lernobjekte übergeführt, kollaborativ von Programmierern, Pädagogen und Designern entwickelt und in einer Datenbank archiviert werden, um von Lehrern und Lernenden eingesetzt, angepasst und weiterentwickelt zu werden. Den ersten Schritt in diese Richtung machte die Lerntechnologie, indem sie Wiederverwendbarkeit und Kompabilität für hypermediale Kurse spezifizierte. Ein größeres Maß an Interaktivität wird bisher allerdings noch nicht in Betracht gezogen. Jedes interaktive Lernobjekt wird als autonome Hypermedia-Einheit angesehen, aufwändig in der Erstellung, und weder mehrstufig verschränk- noch anpassbar, oder gar adäquat spezifizierbar. Dynamische Eigenschaften, Aussehen und Verhalten sind fest vorgegeben. Die vorgestellte Arbeit konzipiert und realisiert Lerntechnologie für hypermediale Kurse unter besonderer Berücksichtigung hochgradig interaktiver Lernobjekte. Innovativ ist dabei zunächst die mehrstufige, komponenten-basierte Technologie, die verschiedenste strukturelle Abstufungen von kompletten Lernobjekten und Werkzeugsätzen bis hin zu Basiskomponenten und Skripten, einzelnen Programmanweisungen, erlaubt. Zweitens erweitert die vorgeschlagene Methodik Kollaboration und individuelle Anpassung seitens der Teilnehmer eines hypermedialen Kurses auf die Software-Ebene. Komponenten werden zu verknüpfbaren Hypermedia-Objekten, die in der Kursdatenbank verwaltet und von allen Kursteilnehmern bewertet, mit Anmerkungen versehen und modifiziert werden. Neben einer detaillierten Beschreibung der Lerntechnologie und Entwurfsmuster für interaktive Lernobjekte sowie verwandte hypermediale Kurse wird der Begriff der Interaktivität verdeutlicht, indem eine kombinierte technologische und symbolische Definition von Interaktionsgraden vorgestellt und daraus ein visuelles Skriptschema abgeleitet wird, welches Funktionalität übertragbar macht. Weiterhin wird die Evolution von Hypermedia und Lehr-/Lernprogrammen besprochen, um wesentliche Techniken für interaktive, hypermediale Kurse auszuwählen. Die vorgeschlagene Architektur unterstützt mehrsprachige, alternative Inhalte, bietet konsistente Referenzen und ist leicht zu pflegen, und besitzt selbst für interaktive Inhalte Online-Assistenten. Der Einsatz hochgradiger Interaktivität in Lehr-/Lernprogrammen wird mit hypermedialen Kursen im Bereich der Computergraphik illustriert.The grand vision of educational software is that of a networked system enabling the learner to explore, discover, and construct subject matters and communicate problems and ideas with other community members. Educational material is transformed into reusable learning objects, created collaboratively by developers, educators, and designers, preserved in a digital library, and utilized, adapted, and evolved by educators and learners. Recent advances in learning technology specified reusability and interoperability in Web-based courseware. However, great interactivity is not yet considered. Each interactive learning object represents an autonomous hypermedia entity, laborious to create, impossible to interlink and to adapt in a graduated manner, and hard to specify. Dynamic attributes, the look and feel, and functionality are predefined. This work designs and realizes learning technology for Web-based courseware with special regard to highly interactive learning objects. The innovative aspect initially lies in the multi-level, component-based technology providing a graduated structuring. Components range from complex learning objects to toolkits to primitive components and scripts. Secondly, the proposed methodologies extend community support in Web-based courseware – collaboration and personalization – to the software layer. Components become linkable hypermedia objects and part of the courseware repository, rated, annotated, and modified by all community members. In addition to a detailed description of technology and design patterns for interactive learning objects and matching Web-based courseware, the thesis clarifies the denotation of interactivity in educational software formulating combined levels of technological and symbolical interactivity, and deduces a visual scripting metaphor for transporting functionality. Further, it reviews the evolution of hypermedia and educational software to extract substantial techniques for interactive Web-based courseware. The proposed framework supports multilingual, alternative content, provides link consistency and easy maintenance, and includes state-driven online wizards also for interactive content. The impact of great interactivity in educational software is illustrated with courseware in the Computer Graphics domain

Automatic Lecture Recording

Lecture recording has become a very common tool to provide students with additional media for their examination preparations. While its effort has to stay reasonable, only a very basic way of recording is done in many cases. Therefore, watching the resulting videos can get very boring completely independent of how interesting the original topic or session was. This thesis proposes a new approach to lecture recordings by letting distributed computers emulate the work of a human camera team, which is the natural way of creating attractive recordings. This thesis is structured in six chapters, starting with the examination of the current situation, and taking its constraints into account. The first chapter concludes with a reflection on related work. Chapter two is about the design of our prototype system. It is deduced from a human camera team in the real world which gets transferred into the virtual world. Finally, a detailed overview about all parts necessary for our prototype and their planned functionality is given. In chapter three, the implementation of all parts and tasks and the incidents occurring during implementation are described in detail. Chapter four describes the technical experiences made with the different parts during development, testing and evaluation with a view to functionality, performance, and an proposal towards future work. The evaluation of the whole system with students is presented and discussed in the fifth chapter. Chapter six concludes this thesis by summing up the facts and gives an outlook on future work

Estudio del rendimiento de arquitecturas basadas en grupos para WAHSN

[ES] Existen muchos trabajos relacionados con las redes ad hoc y las redes de sensores donde se presentan nuevos protocolos que encaminamiento que aportan mejores características, otros trabajos donde se comparan para ver cual posee un mejor rendimiento ó incluso presentan nuevas aplicaciones basadas en este tipo de redes, pero este trabajo aporta otro punto de vista. ¿Por que no ver la red como un conjunto que se divide en grupos para aportar un mejor rendimiento a la red independientemente del protocolo de encaminamiento utilizado?. Para ello, en este trabajo, vamos a demostrar a través de simulaciones, que la agrupación de nodos en redes WAHSN (Wireless Ad Hoc & Sensor Networks) aporta mejoras a la red en general, disminuyendo el tráfico de encaminamiento, el retardo, el throughput, etc. Este estudio se ha realizado evaluando los protocolos estándar más utilizados (DSR [1], AODV [2] y OLSR [3]), así podemos observar cual de ellos aporta un mejor rendimiento. Finalmente, se propone una arquitectura de red basada en grupos optimizada para las redes WAHSN[EN] There are many works related with ad hoc networks and sensor networks where the authors present new routing protocols with better or enhanced features, others just compare the performance of them or present an application environment, but this work tries to give another point of view. Why don¿t we see the network as a whole and split it intro groups to give better performance to the network regardless of the used routing protocol?. First, we will demonstrate, through simulations, that grouping nodes in WAHSN (Wireless Ad Hoc & Sensor Networks) improves the whole network by diminishing the routing traffic, the delay, the throughput, etc. This study was conducted to assess the most used standard protocols (DSR [1], AODV [2] and OLSR [3]) that gives better performance to the whole network when there are groups of nodes. Finally, a group-based network architecture optimized for WAHSN is proposedGarcía Pineda, M. (2008). Estudio del rendimiento de arquitecturas basadas en grupos para WAHSN. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/13472Archivo delegad

Annotierte interaktive nichtlineare Videos - Software Suite, Download- und Cache-Management

Modern Web technology makes the dream of fully interactive and enriched video come true. Nowadays it is possible to organize videos in a non-linear way playing in a sequence unknown in advance. Furthermore, additional information can be added to the video, ranging from short descriptions to animated images and further videos. This affords an easy and efficient to use authoring tool which is capable of the management of the single media objects, as well as a clear arrangement of the links between the parts. Tools of this kind can be found rarely and do mostly not provide the full range of needed functions. While providing an interactive experience to the viewer in the Web player, parallel plot sequences and additional information lead to an increased download volume. This may cause pauses during playback while elements have to be downloaded which are displayed with the video. A good quality of experience for these videos with small waiting times and a playback without interruptions is desired. This work presents the SIVA Suite to create the previously described annotated interactive non-linear videos. We propose a video model for interactivity, non-linearity, and annotations, which is implemented in an XML format, an authoring tool, and a player. Video is the main medium, whereby different scenes are linked to a scene graph. Time controlled additional content called annotations, like text, images, audio files, or videos, is added to the scenes. The user is able to navigate in the scene graph by selecting a button at a button panel. Furthermore, other navigational elements like a table of contents or a keyword search are provided. Besides the SIVA Suite, this thesis presents algorithms and strategies for download and cache management to provide a good quality of experience while watching the annotated interactive non-linear videos. Therefor, we implemented a standard-independent player framework. Integrated into a simulation environment, the framework allows to evaluate algorithms and strategies for the calculation of start-up times, and the selection of elements to pre-fetch into and delete from the cache. Their interaction during the playback of non-linear video contents can be analyzed. The algorithms and strategies can be used to minimize interruptions in the video flow after user interactions. Our extensive evaluation showed that our techniques result in faster start-up times and lesser interruptions in the video flow than those of other players. Knowledge of the structure of an interactive non-linear video can be used to minimize the start-up time at the beginning of a video while minimizing an increase in the overall download volume.Moderne Web-Technologien lassen den Traum von voll interaktiven und bereicherten Videos wahr werden. Heutzutage ist es möglich, Videos in nicht-linearer Art und Weise zu organisieren, welche dann in einer vorher unbekannten Reihenfolge abgespielt werden können. Weiterhin können den Videos Zusatzinformationen in Form von kurzen Beschreibungen über animierte Bilder bis hin zu weiteren Videos hinzugefügt werden. Dies erfordert ein einfach und effizient zu bedienendes Autorenwerkzeug, das in der Lage ist, sowohl einzelne Medien-Objekte zu verwalten, als auch die Verbindungen zwischen den einzelnen Teilen klar darzustellen. Tools dieser Art sind selten und bieten meist nicht den vollen benötigten Funktionsumfang. Während dem Betrachter dieses interaktive Erlebnis im Web Player zur Verfügung gestellt wird, führen parallele Handlungsstränge und zusätzliche Inhalte zu einem erhöhten Download-Volumen. Dies kann zu Pausen während der Wiedergabe führen, in denen Elemente vom Server geladen werden müssen, welche mit dem Video angezeigt werden sollen. Ein gutes Benutzungserlebnis für solche Videos kann durch geringe Wartezeiten und eine unterbrechungsfreie Wiedergabe erreicht werden. Diese Arbeit stellt die SIVA Suite vor, mit der die zuvor beschriebenen annotierten interaktiven nicht-linearen Videos erstellt werden können. Wir bilden Interaktivität, Nichtlinearität und Annotationen in einem Video-Model ab. Dieses wird in unserem XML-Format, Autorentool und Player umgesetzt. Als Leitmedium werden hierbei Videos verwendet, welche aufgeteilt in Szenen zu einer Graphstruktur zusammengefügt werden können. Zeitlich gesteuerte zusätzliche Inhalte, sogenannte Annotationen, wie Texte, Bilder, Audio-Dateien und Videos, werden den Szenen hinzugefügt. Der Betrachter kann im Szenengraph navigieren, indem er in einem bereitgestellten Button-Panel eine Nachfolgeszene auswählt. Andere Navigationselemente sind ein Inhaltsverzeichnis sowie eine Suchfunktion. Neben der SIVA Suite beschreibt diese Arbeit Algorithmen und Strategien für Download und Cache Management, um eine gute Nutzungserfahrung während der Betrachtung der annotierten interaktiven nicht-linearen Videos zu bieten. Ein Webstandard-unabhängiges Playerframework erlaubt es, das Zusammenspiel von Algorithmen und Strategien zu evaluieren, welche für die Berechnung der Start-Zeitpunkte für die Wiedergabe, sowie die Auswahl von vorauszuladenden sowie zu löschenden Elemente verwendet werden. Ziel ist es, Unterbrechungen zu minimieren, wenn der Ablauf des Videos durch Benutzerinteraktion beeinflusst wird. Unsere umfassende Evaluation zeigte, dass es möglich ist, kürzere Startup-Zeiten und weniger Unterbrechungen mit unseren Strategien zu erreichen, als bei der Verwendung der Strategien anderer Player. Die Kenntnis der Struktur des interaktiven nicht-linearen Videos kann dazu verwendet werden, die Startzeit am Anfang der Szenen zu minimieren, während das Download-Volumen nicht erhöht wird

Application of the internet technology and client/server paradigm for the implementation of REPI

There are many problems associated with Requirements Engineering such as defining the system scope, developing understanding among the communities involved in the system to be built, volatility of requirements etc. These problems may lead to poor requirements and therefore cancellation of the system development, or else the development of a system that is unsatisfactory, has high maintenance cost or is unacceptable. By improving Requirements Elicitation, the Requirements Engineering can be improved, leading to a better requirements specification and eventually a better product. Requirements Elicitation requires effective communication among the team members, as communication is the key factor. Easing communications between stakeholders and developers makes the process of Requirements Elicitation easier. REPI guides team members through the elicitation phase using the SEI\u27s framework. REPI forces stakeholders to explicitly describe the requirements resulting in reduced chances of misunderstood requirements, leading to better requirements specification