Workshop on Interactive Content Consumption

Summary

WSICC has established itself as a truly interactive workshop at EuroITV'13, TVX'14, and TVX'15 with three successful editions. The fourth edition of the WSICC workshop aims to bring together researchers and practitioners working on novel approaches for interactive multimedia content consumption. New technologies, devices, media formats, and consumption paradigms are emerging that allow for new types of interactivity. Examples include multi-panoramic video and object-based audio, increasingly available in live scenarios with content feeds from a multitude of sources. All these recent advances have an impact on different aspects related to interactive content consumption, which the workshop categorizes into Enabling Technologies, Content, User Experience, and User Interaction.
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

7:30 - 9:00
Registration & Breakfast (4th floor)

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 - 10:30
Invited keynote by Louise Barkhuus
Interactive Live Performance Experiences

Interactive live performances have become increasingly sophisticated in terms of the range of experiences they offer live audiences, due to technology advances such as faster data speed and sophisticated multimedia technologies, as well as ubiquitous smart phone ownership. Only the imagination limits the inclusion of interactive elements in live performance shows. My research group has followed several productions of interactive theater performances, from rehearsal through audience interaction during live performances and from live streaming of the shows. In this talk I present insights from our most recent studies, following two interactive live plays at Stockholm National Theater. Each play made use of interactive aspects such as dual stages with actors being projected into the other stage live, and audience members creating the background scenography through text messages. I relate our experiences and research findings to broader aspects within live interactive performances and propose a future research agenda that addresses audience liveness and interactivity qualities for such theatrical experiences.

Bio

Louise Barkhuus is a visiting professor at Cornell Tech, NYC and an associate professor at Stockholm University. She is the director of the Location eXperience Lab (LX Lab) that focusses on interactive experiences using location as design elements. Using mainly qualitative in-situ methods, her research aims to explore novel technologies in both everyday and performative settings to inform design of location-based technologies and experiences.

10:30 - 11:00
Coffee break

11:00 - 12:30
3 research paper based talks:

• 11:00
  Dick Bulterman
  Understanding and Measuring Audiences: A Personal Reflection
  Understanding the emotional reactions of audiences to a wide range of content types is an important area of research. In this article, I provide a personal reflection on various approaches to modeling, quantifying and understanding audience behavior based on a broad range of evaluation techniques. Using results from a study of the Heineken Weasel television commercial as a backdrop, I provide an overview of evaluation approaches and their impact in long-term and real-time evaluation. The main contribution is a personal reflection on audience evaluation based on multi-situation affinity with the area.
• 11:30
  Don Kimber, Enock Glidden and Jennifer Marlow
  WorldViews: Connecting the world through easy sharing of views
  The confluence of technologies such as telepresence, immersive imaging, model based virtual mirror worlds, mobile live streaming, etc. give rise to a capability for people anywhere to view and connect with present or past events nearly anywhere on earth. This capability properly belongs to a public commons, available as a birthright of all humans, and can been seen as part of an evolutionary transition supporting a global collective mind. We describe examples and elements of this capability, and suggest how they can be better integrated through a tool we call TeleViewer and a framework called WorldViews, which supports easy sharing of views as well as connecting of providers and consumers of views all around the world.
• 12:00
  Marian F. Ursu, Jonathan Hook, Guy Schofield, Phil Stenton
  Interactive Screen-Media Storytelling: Towards a Unifying Conceptual Framework
  Interactive screen-media storytelling is a concept that denotes the spectrum of mediated narration defined, at one end, by traditional linear storytelling, such as film and TV, and by video games, at the other. The concept is very rich, encompassing narratives able to adapt or react to audiences’ expressed choices and inferred preferences, to devices, time and location, and to others. As such, it is also being referred to by other labels, including: responsive narratives, personalised narratives, dynamic narratives, branching narratives, context-aware narratives, multi-platform narratives, shape-shifting media and object-based broadcasting. The great majority of interactive storytelling productions to date are research prototypes, built to illustrate potential across various dimensions of the term “interactive” and across genres. They are scattered in the rich, multi-dimensional space of interactive narration, but are ad-hoc, disjointed, hardcoded in bespoke implementations and still rather limited in amount. Thus far, there has been no great momentum to research in interactive storytelling, with very little of it having made it into “real world” productions. The main reason for this, we posit, was the insufficiently developed underlying technologies required for their production. Such technologies have recently become available, including HTML5 and JavaScript and TV IP delivery, and are sufficiently mature and comprehensive to allow the development of not only robust research prototype, but also of polished “real world” productions. After a few decades of episodic research, the time is finally ripe for this concept to be properly explored and exploited, and for embryonic research to become main-stream production. Such a development is not entirely dependent upon technology, it also requires a conceptual framework to organise the space of interactive narration. This paper aims to start and sketch such a framework. It presents the different labels used to describe this concept, unveiling their underlying assumptions and defining perspectives, and concludes with a proposition of a multi-dimensional space – a system of orthogonal co-ordinates of analysis – as a frame of reference for interactive storytelling.

• Britta Meixner, Christian Handschigl, Stefan John and Michael Granitzer
  From Single Screen to Dual Screen - a Design study for a User-Controlled Hypervideo-Based Physiotherapy Training
• Rene Kaiser
  The Case for Virtual Director Technology - Enabling Individual Immersive Media Experiences via Live Content Selection and Editing
• Marcus Thaler, Werner Bailer, Stefanie Wechtitsch, Albert Hofmann, Andras Horti, Wolfram Hofmeister, Jameson Steiner and Reinhard Grandl
  Automatic Selection of Live User Generated Content
• Britta Meixner and Fabian Kallmeier
  Speech Control for HTML5 Hypervideo Players
• Rik Bauwens
  Interactive Content Contribution
• Marcus Thaler, Werner Bailer, Stefanie Wechtitsch, Andras Horti, Jameson Steiner, Reinhard Grandl, Wolfram Hofmeister and Albert Hofmann
  Live UCG Stream Selection Using Quality Metadata
• Britta Meixner, Stefan John and Philipp Defner
  Screen Concepts for Multi-Version Hypervideo Authoring

Call for Papers / Participation

The workshop characterizes the Interactive Content Consumption research landscape along four dimensions: Enabling Technologies, Content, User Experience, and User Interaction. WSICC solicits submissions addressing innovations in each of these dimensions. The following taxonomy defines the workshop's scope by examples:

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 (e.g., Virtual Director approaches).
• Research on interactive and adaptive content delivery (e.g., MPEG-DASH).
• Studies on immersive devices, such as VR goggles, wearables, and cyber-physical systems.
• Novel approaches in content production technology (object-based or format-agnostic).
• Novel media coding technologies that inspire interactivity (e.g., H.265/HEVC tiling).
• Tools to infuse interactivity in passive content.
• Approaches for media synchronization and orchestration.

User Experience
The user experience dimension explores research on 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 audiovisual content.
• 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, AR 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, panoramic or 360°-video).

Beyond these four areas, the workshop welcomes discussion on best practices, future challenges, and research road-mapping. 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 (up to 8 pages not including the references), short papers for poster presentations (up to 4 pages not including the references), and technical demos (up to 4 pages not including the references). At least one author of each accepted paper must attend the workshop and all participants must register for the TVX conference.

Aims & Scope

WSICC's objective is to provide a highly interactive discussion forum that allows capturing a comprehensive view on the research area it addresses. During the workshop, an overview on new content interaction concepts, research activities, and future challenges in this area will be concluded and documented. An interdisciplinary view on the topic is 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. Both media consumption needs and habits are constantly evolving. More than half the time is reserved for discussion. The chairs will establish an informal atmosphere, inspired by the basic principles of the Barcamp format. 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. Both organizers and participants will be collecting inputs on large flip charts along multiple question dimensions throughout the day. During the workshop, 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 presentation at the main conference, based on the inputs accumulated on the flip charts. A publication summarizing the workshop results will be considered. Further, the WSICC organization team will give a short overview of inputs from previous editions (mind maps) and from the MTAP Special Issue Interactive Media: Technology and Experience to process the results of the last years for the scientific community.

WSICC’16 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 guided tour session to kick start the poster/demo session. Each contribution is introduced via a short 5 minute pitch in front of the poster or demo.
• 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.
• 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.

Organizers

Britta Meixner is a researcher at FX Palo Alto Laboratory. She received her PhD degree in computer science at the University of Passau, in 2014. Britta is a reviewer for the MTAP Journal (Springer) and was a (co-)organizer of WSICC at TVX2014 and TVX2015. She is an awardee of the ARD/ZDF Förderpreis "Frauen + Medientechnologie" 2015 (2015 Award "Women + Media Technology", granted by Germanys public broadcasters ARD and ZDF) and received a Honorable Mention recognition from the ACM SIGMM in the 2015 SIGMM Outstanding Ph.D. Thesis Award.

Werner Bailer is a key researcher of the audiovisual media group at the DIGITAL – Institute of Information and Communication Technologies at JOANNEUM RESEARCH in Graz, Austria. He received a degree in Media Technology and Design in 2002 for his diploma thesis on motion estimation and segmentation for film/video standards conversion. His research interests include digital film restoration, audiovisual content analysis and retrieval as well as multimedia metadata. He is contributing to multimedia standardization activities in the W3C, MPEG and EBU/AMWA FIMS.

Maarten Wijnants is a post-doctoral researcher affiliated with iMinds, a research institute founded by the Flemish Government in Belgium. He received his PhD in computer science at the Expertise Centre for Digital Media, the ICT research institute of Hasselt University, in 2010. Maarten has been a TPC member for the two most recent editions of the international WEBIST conference.

Rene Kaiser is a key researcher for JOANNEUM RESEARCH. His research focus is on Virtual Director software, on automating the selection/editing of live video streams through cinematographic behavior models. Rene has co-organized every WSICC edition since 2013.

Joscha Jäger is a researcher at Merz Akademie Stuttgart and interface designer at yovisto GmbH in Potsdam, Germany. 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 co-organized WSICC at TVX2014 and TVX2015.

Rik Bauwens attended Hogeschool Gent and obtained his MSc in Applied Engineering (Computer Science) in 2011. Thereafter, he studied English and music, whilst developing web applications for third parties. In 2012, he co-founded an e-learning project, followed by the development of a health care web application. He was responsible for R&D, design and database/server management. Rik is passionate about innovation in web technologies and new media. In 2014, he joined VRT Research & Innovation.

Santosh Basapur is a Senior Lecturer and Planning Coordinator for Human Factors and Systems Design at IIT’s Institute of Design in Chicago. Santosh shifted to academia after being a Principal Staff User Experience Researcher at Motorola Mobility’s (a Google company) Applied Research Center in Chicago for 10 years. His recent research is in interactive media experiences on TV and Tablets/Smartphones. He was the Program chair for first ACM TVX 2014 in Newcastle Upon Tyne and is the General Chair of ACM TVX 2016 to be held in Chicago. His other research application domains are Wellness and Decision Making, Social Media Apps for Interactive TV entertainment. He has published and presented at conferences like CHI, HFES, Euro-iTV, DIS, IASDR, and Design & Emotion.

Frank Bentley is a Principal Researcher at Yahoo in Sunnyvale, CA where he focuses on systems that use content to inspire communication as well as leads user research for the Search organization. Frank was the program chair for ACM TVX in 2015 as well as teaches Mobile HCI classes at MIT, on EdX, and at Stanford. He has built and studied a wide variety of mobile video applications as well as studied how people interact with mobile devices and online services while watching television.