November 15th, 2010
Nederlands
Begin november 2010 is de nieuwe website van Beelden voor de Toekomst gelanceerd. Op deze nieuwe website is een categorie Research toegevoegd. Het merendeel van de artikelen op deze blog is overgezet naar de nieuwe website. De blog zal bereikbaar blijven, maar er zullen geen nieuwe artikelen meer aan toegevoegd worden. Nieuwe research-artikelen verschijnen voortaan op de nieuwe website: http://beeldenvoordetoekomst.nl/nl/research
English
At the start of November 2010, the new website of Images for the Future was launched. On this new website a category ‘Research’ was added. Most of the articles on this blog are transferred to the new website. The blog will remain accessible, but there will be no more new articles added. New research articles will appear on the new website: http://beeldenvoordetoekomst.nl/en/research
Posted by Marcel Oosterwijk in General |
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October 8th, 2010
In the context of Images for the Future, The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision R&D department has designed and developed a complete technical architecture to support (mobile) location-based services for cultural heritage. This October, Sound and Vision will launch the first implementation based on this architecture in the form of an iPhone application that offers mobile access to relevant audiovisual heritage related to war monuments.
The architecture developed by Sound and Vision is based on a Drupal installation that connects to relevant open content repositories (for now: Open Images, Flickr: The Commons and Wikipedia) using their respective API’s, and enables the creation of (mobile) location-based services for cultural heritage. Locations in the real world are linked to digital heritage available online. By building a location-aware application that utilizes the location information and related audiovisual heritage stored in the Drupal installation, users can access relevant information – based on their GPS location to enrich their on-site experience. The architecture also supports applications to enable users to contribute comments and images to the locations themselves.
To promote reuse and further development of the architecture and to ensure that other institutions can easily participate, the complete architecture is based on open source components. Because all information and relations to the online content are centrally stored, it is relatively easy to develop applications on top of the Drupal based architecture. Because the content is separated from the application, this also makes the applications very lightweight. Applications can be an iOS based application (like our first iPhone application), but with a similar effort this can also be an Android of Symbian based application.
Posted by Maarten Brinkerink in Product development, Technology |
Tags: ar, augmented reality, drupal, flickr, gps, landmarks, lbs, location-based services, mobile, open images, wikipedia
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August 3rd, 2010
Within the context of the Images for the Future project the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision is – as mentioned before on this weblog – exploring potential of mobile and location-based access to digital heritage. The goal is to explore how digital heritage can be combined with mobile technology and location awareness to offer an augmented reality (AR) to different types of end users. In this context AR functions by augmenting the physical reality of end users with contextual information using digital means.
As part of this exploration Sound and Vision partnered with the V2_ Institute for the Unstable Media to initiate a multidisciplinary research project (later named ClosAR). The goal of the collaboration was explore new approaches to bring the audiovisual (AV) archive closer to its audience using innovative methods of presentation and interaction, such as augmented reality. The ClosAR group is comprised of five members with a background in new media studies, art science, industrial design engineering, and virtual games.
In their final report (you can download a PDF version here) Bas Bergervoet, Kate Cunningham, Aestha van Dam, Shauna Jin and Connie Yeh propose seven concept directions as possible starting points for Sound and Vision and V2_, with references to the background research and intermediate process:
The classic archive is static: a tomb where “official†documents, media, and information collect dust. Digital technology opens opportunities for information access and presentation, and most notably, participation. As the archive only exists to be accessed, the relationship between itself and its audience is quite important. Augmented reality (AR) brings dynamic information into the physical world. While Beeld en Geluid seeks to improve its visibility outside of its “Experience†and on- site archive search through mobile access, we explored the off-site extreme. How does moving the context of the archive open up possibilities for new interactions? What is the minimum amount of technology needed to achieve this?
Posted by Maarten Brinkerink in Technology |
Tags: access, ar, augmented reality, location-based, mobile
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June 18th, 2010
The 8th EuroITV Conference was held in Tampere, Finland on 9-11 June 2010. EuroITV is the leading conference on interactive television and video. Hosts of the conference were the Tampere University of Technology, the Helsinki University of Technology and the Tampere University of Applied Sciences.
This year’s theme “web.sharing.tv.content†created a space for a very broad range of topics, not only focussing on the television itself, but also on television content on the Internet, the mobile phone and crossovers between television and various other (social) media.
The first day of the conference was dedicated to tutorials, mainly about designing interactive television applications, and workshops about user experiences, the future of television and integrated, ambient television applications. The second and third day were filled with poster presentations, demonstrations and various sessions with a broad range of topics like personalization and recommendation systems, interactive applications and convergence and cross-media. These two days also included two keynotes by Marcos Gonzalez-Flower, Global Head of Media Consulting at Siemens UK and Jyri Huopaniemi, Director of the Nokia Research Center.
The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision has made a substantial contribution to the conference with a short paper presentation about expert search by broadcast professionals, two demonstrations about television and the semantic web, and browsing archival video with advanced video retrieval and last but not least, the Golden Award (first prize) for Waisda? in the Grand Challenge Competition.
Some conference highlights:
Methods for User Studies of Interactive (TV) Technologies
This full day workshop was chaired by Dr. Paul Marrow from BT Innovative & Design, Dr. Lydia Meesters from Eindhoven University of Technology and Prof. Marianna Obrist from the ICT&S Center of the University Salzburg. As the title of the workshop already suggests, this workshop wasn’t just about user studies methodologies for television technologies, but also for interactive technologies in general. Measuring user experiences for any interactive application is a very complex form of research, which requires a very pragmatic and ‘open’ research attitude. This workshop focussed on the many approaches that are used for measuring different levels of user experience. Approximately 20 people joined this workshop, which are all researchers working for various companies and universities, and doing research on interactive applications.
The morning programme contained presentations from the workshop participants about the various approaches and practices in researching user experience. In the afternoon session, participants were asked to pose a number of research questions and problems. After clustering these into main themes, the participants split up in three groups, where one theme was discussed in more detail. The results of the discussions were documented in a poster and presented to the other groups. The main insight of this day was that user experience has to be measured by combining various research methods, both quantitative and qualitative, and that the various stages within the product development require different forms of testing with different user groups.
Session ITV Applications for Communities
This session was scheduled to contain four presentations: two on mobile video sharing and two on digital archiving. Unfortunately, the speaker of the presentation about user inspired digital archiving of cultural heritage wasn’t able to attend, so the focus was mainly drawn towards video on mobile devices.
Mobile Video Sharing: Documentation Tools for Working Communities – Antti Koivisto
Antti Koivisto from Tampere University of Technology presented the development and the infrastructure of MoViE, a mobile application that allows users to create short clips of their environment and upload these to a website where they can share, edit and remix the content Together with his colleagues from Tampere university, he did a first test with the prototype during a festival and although users liked the application a lot, there were some technical issues like a failing Internet connection that made the use of the prototype difficult at times. The test results were used to improve the MoViE application and they are currently working on a new version.
Troubleshooting and Creating Joined Experience: Festival Personnel Engaging in Mobile Video – Anna Haverinen
This talk by Anna Haverinen from the University of Turku reported the results of the first MoViE tests from a user perspective. As a virtual anthropologist, she analysed the kind of content the test subjects created during the test. Eight festival employees acted as test subjects and were asked to shoot and upload videos during the festival. She discovered a great difference between the remarks that people made about the application and the actual use of it. For instance, some people for instance indicated that a commenting tool was very helpful and easy, without actually using it in practice.
Expert Search for Radio and Television: a Case Study amongst Dutch Broadcast Professionals – Wietske van den Heuvel
This talk was given by Wietske van den Heuvel from Sound and Vision. The presentation highlighted the results from a study in which eight broadcast professionals from various broadcasting companies were observed while performing searches with the online search system of Sound and Vision. The research focussed on the question if the task affects the professionals’ search strategy. Three kinds of factors were researched: difference in searching for radio or television content, difference in length (shots versus entire programs) and the influence of time restraints. Results from the study show there is no difference between the search strategies that are used during the performance of the tasks. People always use the same strategy, despite their information need.
The EuroITV 2010 Grand Challenge Competition
The Grand Challenge Competition honours the creation of interactive video content, applications, and services that enhance the television and video viewing experience. The entries are judged by an international jury of interactive media experts and the best entry is awarded with a prize of € 3,000. Three entries were nominated before the start of the conference:
- Smart Video Buddy: an application that analyses video streams and automatically detects semantic concepts, which are used to create links to related content.
- Smeet: one of the fastest growing online 3D world and chat community for entertainment and social viewing on the Internet.
- Waisda?: a video labeling game by Sound and Vision and KRO Broadcasting. The labels or ‘tags’added by Waisda? players can be used as time-related metadata, which improves the findability of the content.
The awards ceremony took place during the first keynote session on June 10, where Waisda? was named as the Grand Challenge winner. The nominated applications were also demonstrated during the rest of the conference day.
Demonstrations
The programme included various interesting demonstrations, two of which were given by Johan Oomen from Sound and Vision. The first demonstration concerned Video Active and EUscreen . Both projects provide free online access to Europe’s television heritage. Video Active ended in August 2009 and EUscreen started as its follow-up project in October 2009. Both projects are funded within the eContentplus programme of the European Commision. EUscreen will contain over 30,000 items and is one of the main audiovisual aggregators for Europeana. The EUscreen portal will be online in January 2011. The second demonstration showed the project Hollands Glorie op Pinkpop, which ended in February 2010. The project is a cooperation between Sound and Vision, Videodock, the University of Amsterdam and the University of Twente. By using automatic concept detection and speech recognition, videos of pop concerts and interviews with the musicians are searchable on individual shot level. Videos from the pop festival Pinkpop were used for this public demo website. Users could also give feedback on the level of retrieval and indicate if the concept detection was right or wrong. This feedback will be used to improve the concept detection technology.
Further reading
Read the full conference programme here
Conference report by CTOi Consulting
Posted by Wietske van den Heuvel in Product development, Technology, User research |
Tags: conference, cultural heritage, European Digital Library, interactive television, search strategies, social tagging, television heritage
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May 31st, 2010
On June 11, the Agora research project will host a symposium entitled “Digital Cultural Heritage Goes Socialâ€. During this afternoon, there will be talks and discussions with internationally renowned researchers and cultural heritage professionals about the possible interaction between the social web and cultural heritage. Sound and Vision is a principal partner in the Agora project.
Invited speakers and panelists:
Carmen Iannacone, Chief Technology Officer for the Smithsonian Institution. He is responsible for evaluating and implementing new technologies for use in the Smithsonian IT infrastructure, and for optimizing performance of its IT operations. The Institution’s nineteen museums and research stations provide a diverse technology climate, and his role is an integral liaison between centralized IT and the public. Prior to joining the Smithsonian, Carmen Iannacone served as director of worldwide IT operations for the Federal Acquisition Service of the General Services Administration (GSA), and was partner a software development consultancy in Alexandria, VA. He holds several patents for software and lives in Sterling, VA. More information about Smithsonian Institution: http://www.si.edu/
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Posted by Johan Oomen in Technology |
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