Interactive Media with Personal Networked Devices(Intermedia)
- Subject: Creation of a network middleware to provide seamless communication between networking components
- Funded by: University of Geneva
- Period: 2006.10 - 2010.9 (4 yrs)
Goal
- INTERMEDIA’s objective is to generate a shared vision of user-centric multimedia services for modern nomadic people, who has high level of mobility and is connected to network for most of times.
Overview
- There have been considerable efforts to have Audio Video systems and applications converge, in particular in home environments with homes as spaces of convergence, and for nomadic users with advanced mobile devices as points of convergence. These trends are important but also have limitations that we seek to address and overcome: home-centric systems fail to account for increased mobility and the desire to provide continuous service across spatial boundaries outside the home; device-centric convergence, e.g. in 3G phones, supports nomadic use but provides a very limited user experience as no single device and interface will fit many different applications well. In this NoE we seek to progress beyond home and device-centric convergence toward truly user-centric convergence of multimedia. Our vision is The User as Multimedia Central: the user as the point at which services (multimedia applications) and the means for interacting with them (devices and interfaces) converge. Key to our vision is that users are provided with a personalized interface and with personalized content independently of the particular set of physical devices they have available for interaction (on the body, or in their environment), and independently of the physical space in which they are situated. Our approach to this vision is to investigate a flexible wearable platform that supports dynamic composition of wearable devices, an ad-hoc connection to devices in the environment, a continuous access to multimedia networks, as well as adaptation of content to devices and user context.
- Objectives:
- Vision toward device-free user-centric media environments
- Constructing multidisciplinary research groups
- Building a common platform with a vision towards semantic convergence
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Intermedia Roadmap |
Research Groups
- Dynamic mobile networking research group
- - The overall goal of this group is to identify, develop and test a reference wireless ad-hoc architecture with support for QoS, multimedia communications, digital rights management(DRM), and secure communications for heterogeneous devices in a home environment. Considering that related issues in networking and DRM are, in general, a very challenging technical problem overall, we will target the development of appropriate common solutions for body area networks, home area networks and their interconnections by integrating state-of-the art achievements in corresponding areas. The goal will be achieved with collaborative integration of different technologies including personalized interface and multimedia content management.
- Multimedia content adaptation and sharing research group
- - The multimedia is presented to different devices for personal manipulation which required adaptation of media to device or personal context along with seamless presentation of the media for different devices. It can be also shared through dynamic networks with other individuals, which requires a redesign of media technology towards multi-way interactions. In the dynamic network environment with user-centric convergence, the adaptation issues should be considered in an integrated way, sharing interactive data, transferring semantic representation, enhanced session mobility for different context and interaction model. INTERMEDIA aims to pave a path toward a framework of user-centric adaptation through the integration of related research achievements in different disciplines.
- Personalized interface research group
- - At the interface level, our aim is to facilitate the seamless interaction with multimedia across varying sets of devices. We will thus investigate the integration of disparate interface developments, across different paradigms such as mobile multimedia, wearable computing (on the body interfaces), and ubiquitous computing (everywhere interfaces). These have developed largely in separation but we will explore how they can be integrated for provision of dynamic personalized interfaces. Our driver in this research will be to provide a coherent user experience – this means looking beyond the technical aspects of providing interfaces across multiple devices to integration at a ‘semantic level’ for provision of meaningfully adapted services.
Related Links
http://intermedia.miralab.unige.ch/ Web site of Intermedia