Project Proposal for USI student from January 2005

Submitted by Lynda Hardman
http://www.cwi.nl/~lynda
(Professor at TU/e and group head at CWI)

16th September 2004



The Passepartout project centres around the delivery of high-quality
(copyrighted) broadband video content to users in the home.  Current
technology allows the viewing of such content in familiar ways, such as
viewing television or DVD's as linear media streams.
Linear viewing of broadcast video content is, however, gradually
becoming augmented by selection of, and interaction with, high-quality
broadcast content.

This project will explore the use of underlying semantic annotations
for allowing interaction with selected content and the ability to
request the personalized generation of hypermedia presentations
supplemental to the main program.

The specific project will depend on the particular expertise and
interests of the student and will be specified within the constraints of
the project with the selected student.

Specific topics for the project will be selected from the following:

characteristics required for the different user models;

models of interaction for single users;

models of interaction for multiple (local and remote) users;

investigation of personal selection and enrichment of content and
exchanging (pointers to) content of personal interest.

For example, linking personal holiday photographs to a travel program
and sharing this with a group of friends.  Or sharing photographs of
attempted recipes from a cooking program.

The work will take place in the context of a (wireless) networked home
environment with particular emphasis on the use of interaction devices
such as (unobtrusive) headphones, tablets, PDA's, data gloves, etc.

The student will be expected to participate in user-centred (interactive
multimedia) design as well as implementing a prototype of the concepts
studied.  The results will later be incorporated in one of the project
demonstrators:

(excerpt from the Passepartout FPP:)

The first demonstrator will show how content can be shared across
multiple home devices connected by a wireless infrastructure, with
content being translated using automatic authoring techniques.

The second demonstrator will show how individual users can augment the
fixed, shared broadcast content by retrieving related information,
assembled automatically as interactive multimedia presentations in
parallel to the main one.

The activity will focus on the sharing of content on multiple classes of
devices and multiple types of interaction tools, such as TabletPCs and
conventional desktop devices. The deliverable will be a demonstrator
implemented on top of a prototype home network environment.