Converged digital TV services: the role of middleware and future directions of interactive television

The subject of the future of the interactive Television medium has become a topic of great interest to the academic and industrial communities particularly since in the recent years there has been a dramatic increase in the pace of innovation of convergence of digital TV systems and services. The purpose of this paper is to provide a brief overview of what we know as digital TV converged services, to present and categorise the digital Television middleware technologies that contributed to it, and to present possible future trends and directions. A new Television era of converged wireless and mobile content delivery, user-authored content, multimodal interaction, intelligent personalisation, smart space awareness, and 3D content sensations is foreseen, creating ambient and immersive experiences

User Interface Abstraction for enabling TV set based Inclusive Access to the Information Society

199 p.The television (TV) set is present in most homes worldwide, and is the most used Information and Communication Technology (ICT). Despite its large implantation in the market, the interactive services consumption on TV set is limited. This thesis focuses on overcoming the following limiting factors: (i) limited Human Computer Interaction and (ii) lack of considering user’s real life context in the digital television (dTV) service integration strategy. Making interactive services accessible to TV set’s large user base, and especially to the most vulnerable ones, is understood as the path to integrate the mankind with the information society. This thesis explores the use of user interface abstraction technologies to reach the introduced goals. The main contributions of this thesis are: (i) an approach to enable the universally accessible remote control of the TV set, (ii) an approach for the provision of universally accessible interactive services through TV sets, and (iii) an approach for the provision of universally accessible services in the TV user’s real life context. We have implemented the contributing approaches for different use cases, and we have evaluated them with real users, achieving good results

Interaction platform-orientated perspective in designing novel applications

The lack of HCI offerings in the invention of novel software applications and the bias of design knowledge towards desktop GUI make it difficult for us to design for novel scenarios and applications that leverage emerging computational technologies. These include new media platforms such as mobiles, interactive TV, tabletops and large multi-touch walls on which many of our future applications will operate. We argue that novel application design should come not from user-centred requirements engineering as in developing a conventional application, but from understanding the interaction characteristics of the new platforms. Ensuring general usability for a particular interaction platform without rigorously specifying envisaged usage contexts helps us to design an artifact that does not restrict the possible application contexts and yet is usable enough to help brainstorm its more exact place for future exploitation

An Architectural Framework for Collaboration of Heterogeneous Communication Devices Using WAP and Mobile Device Augmented(MDA)Gateway Integration

Within the last couple of years, the challenge of displaying collaborative multimedia information has become very important with the large diversity of communication devices such as Personal Computers, laptops, notebooks and handheld devices. The shared data and information may be presented with different views depending on the communication device used by a particular collaborator. The use of various web tools (HTML, WML etc) offers some solutions to the problem but if the target application requires more complex features such as rich multimedia data than is manageable using HTML or WML format, something else need to be done. In this paper, we propose a framework that integrates WAP and MDA Gateway to support collaboration among virtual teams and nomadic workers using heterogeneous communication devices. We then discuss an approach for augmenting mobile device small screen capabilities with surrounding large screen display device

Multimedia broadcast and internet satellite system design and user trial results

The EU funded project, System for Advanced Multimedia Broadcast and IT Services (SAMBITS), has created an enhanced and synchronised, multimedia terminal for merging satellite broadcast and internet telecommunication services in a way that efficiently combines the large bandwidth of the broadcast channel and the interactivity of the internet. This paper proposes a novel broadcast and internet service concept, illustrates this concept with two service scenarios and develops a system architecture to demonstrate the range of key benefits provided by these new technologies. It then describes the interactive multimedia terminal that was used for consuming this new service concept. Finally, the results of the user trials on the terminal are presented and discussed

Wireless multimedia networks

Advances in information technologies have made it possible to have Personal Information Service, i.e., personalized multimedia information available anywhere, anytime. Such ubiquitous access requires that a portion of the underlying network infrastructure be wireless. Therefore, a number of challenges associated with operating a wireless multimedia network must be overcome. In this paper we have. identified these challenges and some solutions.published_or_final_versio

Distributed multimedia systems

A distributed multimedia system (DMS) is an integrated communication, computing, and information system that enables the processing, management, delivery, and presentation of synchronized multimedia information with quality-of-service guarantees. Multimedia information may include discrete media data, such as text, data, and images, and continuous media data, such as video and audio. Such a system enhances human communications by exploiting both visual and aural senses and provides the ultimate flexibility in work and entertainment, allowing one to collaborate with remote participants, view movies on demand, access on-line digital libraries from the desktop, and so forth. In this paper, we present a technical survey of a DMS. We give an overview of distributed multimedia systems, examine the fundamental concept of digital media, identify the applications, and survey the important enabling technologies.published_or_final_versio

Semi-automated mobile television interactive application generation based on XHTML and Java ME

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University, 11/02/2011.Mobile Digital TV (MDTV), the hybrid of Digital Television (DTV) and mobile devices (such as mobile phones), has introduced a new way for people to watch DTV and has brought new opportunities for development in the DTV industry. Nowadays, the development of the next generation MDTV service has progressed in terms of both hardware layers and software, with interactive services/applications becoming one of the future MDTV service trends. However, current MDTV interactive services still lack in terms of attracting the consumers and the service creation and implementation process relies too much on commercial solutions, resulting in most parts of the process being proprietary. In addition, this has increased the technical demands for developers as well as has increased substantially the cost of producing and maintaining MDTV services. In light of the aforementioned situation, the Thesis has contributed to this field, by proposing an innovative MDTV service creation and consumption system based on XHTML and Java ME. On the head-end it introduces a semi-automatic creation mechanism to facilitate a less technical and more efficient interactive service creation process. This enables designers and creative individuals to be actively involved in the MDTV service creation process and to develop interactive-rich MDTV service. On the client-end it employs an open-source software environment as the interactive service MDTV consumption platform, rendering the MDTV service implementation process as less proprietary as possible. Furthermore, the Thesis offers a discussion on the different MDTV interactive application models currently used and based on the proposed software, a novel MDTV service presentation method is further introduced and adopted instead of the Rich Media and ECMAScript based methods. Finally, a series of qualitative testing procedures have been implemented with regards to conducting an essential evaluation on the operability of the proposed software system