=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-1516/p1
|storemode=property
|title=RITE: Rich Information Television
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1516/p1.pdf
|volume=Vol-1516
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/tvx/Ganhor15
}}
==RITE: Rich Information Television==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1516/p1.pdf
RITE: Rich Information Television
Roman Ganhör
Vienna University of Technology
Favoritenstrasse 9-11, 1040 Vienna
roman@media.tuwien.ac.at
ABSTRACT supplementary information is provided almost solely as text
When the Internet became more interactive it turned passive and omitting opportunities for rich and appropriate user
consumers of information into active providers of such. experiences. Thus, retrieving additional information
Over the time, volunteers built impressive databases filled requires a contextual change for the user, switching from a
with information for virtually every niche. In this paper we passive viewer of a motion picture to an active investigator
present RITE, an idea for augmenting films and TV serials for text. This contextual change not only disturbs the
with supplementary information that is freely available on viewing experience, the collected metadata is also short-
the Internet. An easy, yet powerful interface and interaction lived as there is no defined way or place to store it or share
design should encourages laid-back TV consumers to it with other users.
contribute. Thus, the system shall be optimized for different
input devices such as tablets, smartphones or TV remotes. To overcome these limitations we propose RITE, a system
Besides, various automatism are intended to simplify the with an intuitive and efficient user interface and elaborated
process of contribution even more. interaction design allowing people to process, collect,
maintain and share metadata for any kind of film or TV
Author Keywords serials. The metadata is collected automatically or manually
Interactive TV; Second Screen; User Experience; Social from external online sources and put into relation to a given
Interaction movie or TV serial.
ACM Classification Keywords
H5.1 [Information Interfaces and presentation]: Multimedia BACKGROUND: TV AND INTERNET TECHNOLOGY
information systems – audio, video; H5.m [Information The habit of consuming television has widened from
Interfaces and presentation (e.g., HCI)]: Miscellaneous scheduled programs on TV sets to video on demand
services displayed on TV sets, desktop computers and
INTRODUCTION mobile devices. Consequently, new features enriching the
By Web 2.0 we describe the transformation of the Internet TV experience have to consider the variations in means of
into a more interactive tool, allowing users to provide media transportation and consumption.
information as well as consuming information. Blogs were Web techniques such as HTML and JavaScript can serve as
a first widespread manifestation of user-generated content. a common denominator. Internet based television embeds
Nowadays, Wikipedia is one of the biggest projects so far HTML meta-information in the video stream or sends the
linked to the term Web 2.0 connecting tens of thousands of meta-information as a separate data stream, whereas
volunteers actively writing and editing articles [1]. broadcast television (via satellite, cable, terrestrial) utilizes
While Wikipedia is a universal dictionary other online HbbTV [2] to embed HTML meta-information.
resources are more focused. The international movie Permitting users easy access to semi-structured data on
database (IMDb.com), for example, is a single purpose various websites like IMDb or Wikipedia the data has to be
database concentrating solely on motion pictures. The pre-processed and structured using API's provided by the
website collects and provides information about movies as websites and heuristics based on user behavior.
well as TV serials. This information covers virtually every
aspect of a given motion picture including actors, Easing the annotation process even more advanced
producers, dates, places, quotes and cross references to techniques like face-recognition can be utilized. Plus, since
other motion pictures. the numbers of persons acting in a film is limited and due to
external databases known to the algorithm the task of face
Whenever watching a motion picture on television or on the recognition can be enhanced in quality.
Internet, the odds are good that a plethora of additional
information and metadata is available online. However, this RITE - RICH INFORMATION TELEVISION
In this section we describe the idea for a rich information
television system, RITE, in detail. We envision an
3rd International Workshop on Interactive Content Consumption at
enhanced television experience based on additional in-situ
TVX’15, June 3rd, 2015, Brussels, Belgium.
Copyright is held by the author(s)/owner(s). information. The information is provided by various
external or third-party Internet resources and can be Internet and linking this information to a specific scene in
retrieved comfortably by a user while watching a movie or the film or TV serial. To support users at this level the user
TV serial. That is, whenever a user picks an actor on the interface has to support video browsing and video
screen (with an appropriate device), RITE finds the name annotation. As actors or buildings are not visible throughout
for this actor and provides links to further information. Or the whole film, annotations start at some position in the
else, whenever a user queries information about a specific film and end at another position. Furthermore, the annotated
building he or she has seen on the film RITE provides its object's size can vary over time, due to zooming or
name and its location in-situ. Again, the information movement of the object. Automatized object tracking can
provides links to further more detailed information. support users annotation tasks.
As users who participate in retrieving and linking
Information Maintenance
information are crucial to the project, RITE has low entry Maintaining the information is also an important aspect to
barriers and easy-to-use interfaces allowing even casual keep metadata up to date and the system useful for the user.
users to contribute. The low entry barriers refer to the RITE has to take care of various dimensions of
organizational structure and concepts like editing and maintenance, such as keeping up-to-date with modifications
contributing without prior registration. A transparent review on external sources and overhauling existing information.
and feedback mechanism ranks contributions according
their quality and an undo-function reverts vandalism When changes to the external sources affects only the data
entries. Another important aspect is the interface and layer the changes can be incorporated automatically.
interaction design, addressing both the demands of novice Whenever external sources have changes on their technical
users and claims of advanced users. The challenges for a base, such as the database layer, RITE must be adapted to
feasible interface and interaction design are manifold, the new technical conditions.
however, in a first step we focus on three crucial tasks:
Overhauling existing information requires easy interfaces
information aggregation and linking, information
and interaction design to animate lean back television
maintenance and information invoking.
consumer to fix broken or false data.
Information Aggregation and Linking
Information Invoking - Watching with RITE
An important task is finding relevant information and
In contrast to information aggregation, linking and
linking this information to a film or TV serial. The process
maintenance, information invoking is the unobtrusive and
of aggregating and linking additional metadata can be partly
optional task to invoke information during watching a
automatized. So can sources like IMDb.com, Wikipedia and
movie or TV serial. Depending on the device (tablet,
other (not only film related) websites be crawled with
smartphone, TV remote) the interaction design is tailored to
specialized programs and crawlers to retrieve relevant
their favorable affordances [4].
information. As relevant information on various websites
can be structured or unstructured, the information can either When using a tablet or smartphone the respective screen
be gathered through specific API requests or must be replicates the content of the main screen and the touch
retrieved through parsing and semantic matching. mechanism is utilized to provide a pleasant and easy user
experience. The interaction design for a TV remote
A starting point for automatized information gathering can
concentrates on the directional pad to allow slackened
be online TV journals providing name and date of the
usage even during dark conditions.
current TV program. Based on this initial information
further search queries can be conducted. Advanced
USER INTERFACE
recognition systems such as reverse pictures search can The user interface of RITE has to support two distinct use-
check results against the databases mentioned above and cases. Whereas most of the time a user retrieves
enhance the overall quality of the automatized output. information from the system, sometimes a user likes to add
However, in a second step a user manually confirms or information to the system.
denies the automatically collected information. Depending Figure 1 depicts a potential user interface for retrieving
on the users judgment the information is ranked as information while a movie is running. The pink rectangles
trustworthy or not trustworthy. The automatic process tries indicate persons or things RITE has already information
to provide highly accurate information, however, the user stored about, like real name and film character name. The
acts as a last instance. Thus, the interface design must be purple rectangle, in contrast, mark persons or things other
both easy to understand and able to encourage even laid- user has marked as potentially interesting. In Figure 1 the
back users to contribute [3]. actor in the scene is selected and the information about him
The lowest level of user contribution is confirming or is listed in the left section of the screen. With a remote
denying information that was automatically retrieved and control a user can "hop" from one rectangle to another
provided by the system. In contrast, the highest level of utilizing the directional pad. When using a touch interface a
contribution is manually searching for information on the
user touches within the boundaries of a rectangle to activate CONCLUSION
the information bar. 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.
REFERENCES
1. Amazon Corp., 2015, http://www.alexa.com/topsites
2. Institut für Rundfunktechnik GmbH - Open IPTV
Forum. 2015. https://www.hbbtv.org/
3. Knauf, R. et al. 2010. Constraints and simplification for
a better mobile video annotation and content
customization process. Workshop Proc. EuroITV.
Figure 1: RITE screenshot showing overlays for (potential) 4. Cruickshank, L. et.al. 2007. Making interactive TV
persons and objects of interest. easier to use: Interface design for a second screen
approach. The Design Journal 10, no. 3
The amount of information within the information bar is
adapted to the screen size and can be adapted to the users
preferences.