Workshop on Interactive Content Consumption

Summary

The third edition of the WSICC workshop aims to bring together researchers and practitioners working on novel approaches for interactive multimedia content consumption. WSICC has established itself with a truly interactive workshop format at EuroITV and TVX with two successful editions. This year's workshop will put emphasis on the user experience. It allows for lots of discussion and makes sure every participate can learn something new and network. You can read here about its aim and scope. You are invited to participate in the workshop. If you plan doing so, you might also want to contribute a poster or demo, or present a research paper or industry study. See deadlines and templates below.

Program

9:00 - 9:30
Welcome and presentation of workshop aims. Interactive participant introduction in Barcamp style (name, affiliation, 3 keywords to communicate interest and focus).

9:30 - 9:45
Short pitches (1min, 1 slide each) to kickstart poster / demo session

9:45 - 10:30
Invited Keynote by Dr. Judith Redi
Enabling the ”Wow!” Multimedia Experience: achievements and challenges in multimedia delivery optimization

Modern multimedia technologies are challenged to handle always bigger quantities of visual information with a limited set of resources (e.g. bandwidth or storage space). As a result, media are often delivered to the final user in a sub-optimal way, presenting visual distortions or after long stalling times, which compromises the user satisfaction and the quality of the visual experience.
To steer a user-oriented optimization of media delivery chains, a key step is therefore the understanding and modelling of users’ Quality of multimedia Experience (QoE).

For a long time, QoE modeling targeted user sensitivity to impairments induced in the media by suboptimal delivery. The media recipient was considered a passive observer, whose appreciation of the video material was determined primarily by the degree of annoyance due to the impairments affecting it. With the advent of mobile technology and internet-based media delivery, this impairment-centric concept of QoE has shown to be inadequate. The media recipient is now a user who creates content, interacts with the system and selects the media he/she wants to have delivered. As a result, elements such as visual semantics, user personality, preferences and intent, social and environmental context of media consumption also concur to the final experience assessment. Nevertheless, their role in the experience appreciation is yet to be understood. In this talk, I will review the existing results and the many open questions that QoE assessment research is facing. I will analyse relevant features and factors influencing QoE, and point out the gaps that still need to be filled prior to be able to implement an encompassing and reliable model of user QoE appreciation.

Bio

Judith Redi is Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science (EECMS) of Delft University of Technology. She obtained her PhD, funded by Philips Research and targeting quality assessment in consumers displays, from the University of Genoa in 2010. For this work, she also received the ASING best thesis award 2010. After a post-doc period at Eurecom, France, working on digital image forensics and computer vision, she moved to the Intelligent Systems department of TU Delft, to work on the understanding and modeling of perceptual, cognitive and affective mechanisms underlying visual experience appreciation. For this research, she was recently awarded a NWO VENI personal grant. Dr. Redi is involved in the organization of a number of conferences and scientific events; she has been co-chair for CrowdMM 2014 and 2015, TPC chair for QoMEX 2015, and WG deputy leader in the COST action IC1003 “Qualinet”

10:30 - 11:00
Coffee Break

11:00 - 11:45
Poster / Demo Session

• Mark Melenhorst, Ron van der Sterren, Andreas Arzt, Agustin Martorell and Cynthia Liem
  A Tablet App to Enrich the Live and Post-Live Experience of Classical Concerts
• Werner Bailer, Marcus Thaler and Georg Thallinger
  Spatiotemporal Video Synchronisation by Visual Matching
• Steven Simpson, Mu Mu, Omar Niamut, Jacco Taal and Nicholas Race
  Collective user experience: Community-driven story co-authoring in live events
• Maarten Wijnants, Gustavo Rovelo Ruiz, Donald Degraen, Peter Quax, Kris Luyten and Wim Lamotte
  Web-Powered Virtual Site Exploration Based on Augmented 360 Degree Video via Gesture-Based Interaction
• Britta Meixner and Martin Kuchler
  Where Can I Add This Annotation?
• Michael Frantzis
  Connectivism & Interactive Narrative: towards a new form of video in online education
• Roman Ganhör
  RITE: Rich Information Television

• 14:00
  Lucia D'Acunto, Judith Redi and Omar Niamut
  iCaCoT - interactive Camera-based Coaching and Training
• 14:30
  Gerald Binder
  Smart Ski Goggles – Development and Business Model Generation of Smart Glasses Applications
• 15:00
  Markus Rickert, Benedikt Etzold and Maximilian Eibl
  A Graph-Based Approach and Analysis Framework for Hierarchical Browsing of Video Content

Call for Papers / Participation

This years' edition of WSICC focuses on novel approaches for interactive multimedia content consumption in the context of the user's experience. Based on the results of previous editions, we welcome contributions that address at least one of the four dimensions: Enabling Technologies, User Experience, User Interaction and Content:

Enabling Technologies
This dimension searches for technology and tools for the consumption and the authoring of interactive content, especially:

• Techniques for content adaptation, rendering and converting for a wide variety of devices and delivery channels.
• Approaches for interactive personalization and recommendation.
• Research on interactive content delivery.
• Studies on immersive devices, such as VR goggles, wearables, and cyber-physical systems.
• Novel approaches in content production technology (object-based or format-agnostic).

User Experience
The user experience dimension explores research on the quality of user experience (QoE) theory and evaluations, the impact and effects of interaction on perceived quality, the role of the audience, and the role of social context. It investigates the effect of increased interactivity and user engagement, empowerment but also overload and distraction, e.g.:

• Studies and foundations from the social sciences.
• Evaluation of user needs regarding personalized content consumption.
• Research on collaborative and community-based multimedia consumption and creation.
• Exploration of immersive audio.
• Approaches for inclusion and improved accessibility (e.g. automatic content enhancement for special needs).

User Interaction
This dimension analyzes novel interaction approaches, concepts and paradigms. Thereby, interactivity might be interpreted both as computer mediated communication as well as human computer interaction. Interest lies in:

• Research on natural interaction techniques.
• Experiments on multi-modal interaction and social signal processing, especially gesture control and speech recognition.
• Studies on social interaction during content consumption and mobile content consumption.
• Methods of feedback for user control, including visual, acoustic and tactile interaction.
• Studies on lean-forward interaction trends and joint interaction of larger groups.
• Studies on the balance between active (lean forward) and passive (lean backward) content consumption.

Content
The content dimension researches new types and forms of interactive content, such as:

• Content from gaming or the mobile and VR domains.
• Live and recorded materials.
• Data representation formats for interactive content.
• Adaptable content and content of variable length.
• High-quality and ultra-high definition content.
• Content captured by novel types of sensors (e.g. 3D or panoramic video).

Beyond these four areas, contributions may report on best practices, future challenges and research roadmapping. WSICC is welcoming contributions from any relevant application domain such as entertainment and infotainment, storytelling, mediated communication and telepresence, technology enhanced learning (TEL) and teaching, ambient assisted living (AAL), augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR), games, and tele-health. We further encourage research on the integration of media consumption with any other activities.

We are seeking 3 types of submissions: full research papers for oral presentations (4-6 pages), short papers for poster presentations (2 pages), and technical demos (2 pages). At least one author of each accepted paper must attend the workshop and all participants must register for the TVX conference.

Aims & Scope

The aims and scope of WSICC'15 have been sharpened based on the results from previous workshops. New technologies, devices, media formats and consumption paradigms are emerging that allow for new types of interactivity. All these recent advances have an impact on the user's experience - therefore, all WSICC contributions are invited to include considerations regarding the impact of their results on the user experiences.

An interdisciplinary view on the topic shall be compiled by contributions from technical research, conceptual work, user-centric studies, industry developments, as well as experimental showcases. In other words, the workshop aims to examine and evaluate new forms of content interaction by discussing the field along three axes:

• Recent technological advances that enable new forms of audiovisual content interaction
• User-centric studies that evaluate new types of audiovisual content interaction, especially in the realm of societal trends and media consumption paradigm shifts
• Studies from industry considering and evaluating user needs and the impact of advances in this area

Workshop Format

WSICC has developed a workshop format to stimulate both networking and knowledge transfer among the participants. The full day workshop will be an active forum to discuss research challenges, methodologies and results in a field that maintains relevance in an ever-changing landscape of new device types, content forms, and growing technical infrastructure.
More than half the time will be reserved for discussion. The chairs will establish an informal atmosphere, inspired by Barcamps. In an active moderating role, they will make sure the workshop's underlying questions will be discussed, answered as far as possible and documented. Nevertheless they will allow some flexibility in order to meet the interest of the audience spontaneously, as appropriate.
Throughout the day, the audience will be encouraged to contribute, and especially to comment existing inputs (I'd love to collaborate on this!... This has already been solved in my project!). The outcome of the workshop will be summarized on a poster for the presentation at the main conference.

WSICC’15 will consist of the following sessions:

• Welcome, introduction to the workshop format, and presentation of workshop aims.
• Interactive participant introduction in Barcamp style (name, affiliation, role, 3 keywords/hashtags).
• Invited keynote. It should cover WSICC’s scope rather broadly in order to establish a common understanding among the participants.
• A madness session to kickstart the poster/demo session where each is presented by a short pitch of 2min.
• The poster and demo session. Posters are based on short paper contributions. Technical demos are regarded an essential part of the workshop as they allow discussion upon hands-on experience. This session shall establish an understanding of everybody’s work, focus and interest.
• Three research paper based talks. In line with the informal atmosphere, questions will be allowed during the talks.
• Two sessions in fishbowl discussion format, around aspects raised during WSICC. In a nutshell, there is a limited number of active seats. If you want to say something, you have to take an empty seat or wait for one. This format of a dynamically changing working panel proved to work well for discussions among experts on concrete questions. The fishbowl format has been understood very well and quickly in the past by WSICC participants.
• Concluding session. The group will revisit what has been collected throughout the day. Conclusions will be summarized. A best paper award will be given to the contribution with the highest review scores regardless of its type.

Program Comittee

• Patrice Rondao Alface, Alcatel-Lucent, Belgium
• Olivier Aubert, University of Nantes, France
• Arne Berger, TU Chemnitz, Germany
• Mario Montagud Climent, Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain
• Maximilian Eibl, TU Chemnitz, Germany
• Javier Ruiz Hidalgo, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Spain
• Christian Kaiser, Virtual Vehicle Research Center, Austria
• Rodrigo Laiola, IBM Research, Brazil
• Symeon (Akis) Papadopoulos, CERTH-ITI, Greece
• Klaus Schöffmann, Klagenfurt University, Austria
• Christin Seifert, University of Passau, Germany
• Wolfgang Weiss, Joanneum Research, Austria
• Doug Williams, BT, United Kingdom
• Fernando Boronat, Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain

Organizers

Rene Kaiser is a key researcher for JOANNEUM RESEARCH and has been involved in a number of European projects dealing with automation of content production such as NM2, APOSDLE, FascinatE, TA2 and Vconect. His research focus is on automating shot selection through cinematographic behavior models. Rene is a PhD student at TU Graz and head of the Knowledge Management Forum Graz. Rene has co-organized the first edition of WSICC at EuroITV 2013 and its second edition at TVX 2014. He also organized the Interactive and Immersive Entertainment and Communication Special Session at MMM'12. He is part of a group hosting the annual PhD cooperation workshop at the i-KNOW conference, active member and E-Letter chair of IEEE STCSN, and co-organizer of the Barcamp Graz, a yearly 3-day unconference which is an interactive and open discussion format.

Britta Meixner is a researcher at Passau University. She received a diploma in computer science and a state examination for lectureship at secondary schools from the University of Passau, Germany, in 2008. She made her PhD degree in computer science at the Faculty of Computer Science and Mathematics of the University of Passau, in 2014. Her PhD thesis has the title "Annotated Interactive Non-linear Video - Software Suite, Download and Cache Management". Further she is interested in hypervideo on mobile devices, collaborative hypervideo creation, and decision rules in hypervideo. Britta is a member of the BMBF research project "mirKUL" that investigates application scenarios of interactive non-linear video. Britta is a reviewer for the Multimedia Tools and Applications Journal (Springer) and was a member of the program committee of the 1st International Workshop on Interactive Content Consumption at EuroITV 2013 and an organizer of the 2nd International Workshop on Interactive Content Consumption at TVX2014.

Joscha Jaeger is a researcher at Merz Akademie Stuttgart and founder of filmicweb - Hypervideo Interface Design. His research covers web-based hypervideo technology, time-based interaction, and semantic video search interfaces. Joscha has a strong focus on film as information architecture, collaborative editing systems for non-linear film, and user-driven annotation systems. He is interested in finding new ways of distributed interaction with open video technologies and interfaces on the web. He was an organizer of the 2nd International Workshop on Interactive Content Consumption at TVX2014.

Katrin Tonndorf is a researcher at Passau University. She received a magister degree in media studies from the Technical University Braunschweig and the Braunschweig University of Arts in 2010. Currently, she is working towards a PhD degree in communication studies at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at University of Passau. She is conducting research in the area of online and social media communication practices. Furthermore she is interested in the use of interactive audiovisual content for learning and support purposes. Katrin is also a member of the BMBF research project "mirKUL".

Omar Aziz Niamut is a senior research scientist at TNO. He has a background in the coding and transport of digital signals. His PhD research included the development of universal audio coding algorithms. He advised the European Parliament on the harmonization of mobile TV and was editor of the technology report on mobile TV in the European Commission - assigned European Mobile Broadcast Council. He participated in ETSI TISPAN standardization with over 200 contributions on interactive services for next-generation IPTV and advised the Singapore government on the use of IPTV standards. His current focus is on social and interactive media services over next-generation networks and immersive media delivery. He is the author of academic papers and articles in the fields of audio coding, interactive IPTV services and immersive media. Omar holds over 15 patents and has contributed a chapter to a book on Social TV. He has been a member of the EuroITV TPC, for the Systems and Enabling Technologies track.

David Marston is a senior R&D engineer for the BBC's Research and Development department. He is a part of the audio team which specialised in various areas of broadcast related audio research work, including the latest developments in object-based audio. Among Dave's responsibilities is standardisation work and is chairman of the EBU FAR-BWF group and a ITU-R WP6B rapporteur group both working on file formats for future audio. Dave is also project manager for the BBC's part of the EU-funded ICoSOLE collaborative project (JRS being one of the project partners), which includes work on immersive and interactive audio to enhance the audience experience.