When the Internet became more interactive it turned passive consumers of information into active providers of such. Over the time, volunteers built impressive databases filled with information for virtually every niche. In this paper we present RITE, an idea for augmenting films and TV serials with supplementary information that is freely available on the Internet. An easy, yet powerful interface and interaction design should encourages laid-back TV consumers to contribute. Thus, the system shall be optimized for different input devices such as tablets, smartphones or TV remotes. Besides, various automatism are intended to simplify the process of contribution even more.
While Wikipedia is a universal dictionary other online resources are more focused. The international movie database (IMDb.com), for example, is a single purpose database concentrating solely on motion pictures. The website collects and provides information about movies as well as TV serials. This information covers virtually every aspect of a given motion picture including actors, producers, dates, places, quotes and cross references to other motion pictures.
Whenever watching a motion picture on television or on the Internet, the odds are good that a plethora of additional information and metadata is available online. However, this supplementary information is provided almost solely as text and omitting opportunities for rich and appropriate user experiences. Thus, retrieving additional information requires a contextual change for the user, switching from a passive viewer of a motion picture to an active investigator for text. This contextual change not only disturbs the viewing experience, the collected metadata is also shortlived as there is no defined way or place to store it or share it with other users.
To overcome these limitations we propose RITE, a system with an intuitive and efficient user interface and elaborated interaction design allowing people to process, collect, maintain and share metadata for any kind of film or TV serials. The metadata is collected automatically or manually from external online sources and put into relation to a given movie or TV serial.
BACKGROUND: TV AND INTERNET TECHNOLOGY The habit of consuming television has widened from scheduled programs on TV sets to video on demand services displayed on TV sets, desktop computers and mobile devices. Consequently, new features enriching the TV experience have to consider the variations in means of media transportation and consumption.
Web techniques such as HTML and JavaScript can serve as
a common denominator. Internet based television embeds
HTML meta-information in the video stream or sends the
meta-information as a separate data stream, whereas
broadcast television (via satellite, cable, terrestrial) utilizes
HbbTV [
Permitting users easy access to semi-structured data on various websites like IMDb or Wikipedia the data has to be pre-processed and structured using API's provided by the websites and heuristics based on user behavior.
Easing the annotation process even more advanced techniques like face-recognition can be utilized. Plus, since the numbers of persons acting in a film is limited and due to external databases known to the algorithm the task of face recognition can be enhanced in quality.
RITE - RICH INFORMATION TELEVISION In this section we describe the idea for a rich information television system, RITE, in detail. We envision an enhanced television experience based on additional in-situ information. The information is provided by various external or third-party Internet resources and can be retrieved comfortably by a user while watching a movie or TV serial. That is, whenever a user picks an actor on the screen (with an appropriate device), RITE finds the name for this actor and provides links to further information. Or else, whenever a user queries information about a specific building he or she has seen on the film RITE provides its name and its location in-situ. Again, the information provides links to further more detailed information. As users who participate in retrieving and linking information are crucial to the project, RITE has low entry barriers and easy-to-use interfaces allowing even casual users to contribute. The low entry barriers refer to the organizational structure and concepts like editing and contributing without prior registration. A transparent review and feedback mechanism ranks contributions according their quality and an undo-function reverts vandalism entries. Another important aspect is the interface and interaction design, addressing both the demands of novice users and claims of advanced users. The challenges for a feasible interface and interaction design are manifold, however, in a first step we focus on three crucial tasks: information aggregation and linking, information maintenance and information invoking.
Information Aggregation and Linking
An important task is finding relevant information and
linking this information to a film or TV serial. The process
of aggregating and linking additional metadata can be partly
automatized. So can sources like IMDb.com, Wikipedia and
other (not only film related) websites be crawled with
specialized programs and crawlers to retrieve relevant
information. As relevant information on various websites
can be structured or unstructured, the information can either
be gathered through specific API requests or must be
retrieved through parsing and semantic matching.
A starting point for automatized information gathering can
be online TV journals providing name and date of the
current TV program. Based on this initial information
further search queries can be conducted. Advanced
recognition systems such as reverse pictures search can
check results against the databases mentioned above and
enhance the overall quality of the automatized output.
However, in a second step a user manually confirms or
denies the automatically collected information. Depending
on the users judgment the information is ranked as
trustworthy or not trustworthy. The automatic process tries
to provide highly accurate information, however, the user
acts as a last instance. Thus, the interface design must be
both easy to understand and able to encourage even
laidback users to contribute [
The lowest level of user contribution is confirming or denying information that was automatically retrieved and provided by the system. In contrast, the highest level of contribution is manually searching for information on the Internet and linking this information to a specific scene in the film or TV serial. To support users at this level the user interface has to support video browsing and video annotation. As actors or buildings are not visible throughout the whole film, annotations start at some position in the film and end at another position. Furthermore, the annotated object's size can vary over time, due to zooming or movement of the object. Automatized object tracking can support users annotation tasks.
Information Maintenance Maintaining the information is also an important aspect to keep metadata up to date and the system useful for the user. RITE has to take care of various dimensions of maintenance, such as keeping up-to-date with modifications on external sources and overhauling existing information. When changes to the external sources affects only the data layer the changes can be incorporated automatically. Whenever external sources have changes on their technical base, such as the database layer, RITE must be adapted to the new technical conditions.
Overhauling existing information requires easy interfaces and interaction design to animate lean back television consumer to fix broken or false data.
Information Invoking - Watching with RITE
In contrast to information aggregation, linking and
maintenance, information invoking is the unobtrusive and
optional task to invoke information during watching a
movie or TV serial. Depending on the device (tablet,
smartphone, TV remote) the interaction design is tailored to
their favorable affordances [
When using a tablet or smartphone the respective screen replicates the content of the main screen and the touch mechanism is utilized to provide a pleasant and easy user experience. The interaction design for a TV remote concentrates on the directional pad to allow slackened usage even during dark conditions.
USER INTERFACE The user interface of RITE has to support two distinct usecases. Whereas most of the time a user retrieves information from the system, sometimes a user likes to add information to the system.
Figure 1 depicts a potential user interface for retrieving information while a movie is running. The pink rectangles indicate persons or things RITE has already information stored about, like real name and film character name. The purple rectangle, in contrast, mark persons or things other user has marked as potentially interesting. In Figure 1 the actor in the scene is selected and the information about him is listed in the left section of the screen. With a remote control a user can "hop" from one rectangle to another utilizing the directional pad. When using a touch interface a user touches within the boundaries of a rectangle to activate the information bar.
The amount of information within the information bar is adapted to the screen size and can be adapted to the users preferences.
CONCLUSION RITE should augment existing movies and TV serials with additional meta-information that is freely available on the Internet. To support user involvement, the interface and interaction design will be adjusted to laid-back consumers. In addition, advanced algorithms can be utilized to simplify the users’ burden.