Collective user experience: Community-driven story co-
authoring in live events
Steven Simpson Mu Mu Omar Niamut Jacco Taal Nicholas Race
Lancaster University Lancaster University TNO Bitnomica Lancaster University
Lancaster, UK Lancaster, UK The Netherlands The Netherlands Lancaster, UK
ABSTRACT creative process of capturing content. The application
Audio-visual narratives are becoming the most popular should also capture metadata such as the geographical
medium for information sharing and social storytelling location of the user device at the time of capturing.
around a live event. This paper explores the collective
experience of users of an online creative storytelling eco-
system. The system provides an ideal platform to study
community-driven story co-authoring helped by social
networks and networked media, as highlighted in an event-
based user experiment.
INTRODUCTION
This paper describes several designs and innovations that
comprise an online multimedia storytelling system
facilitating user-driven story authoring conducted directly
by loosely formed communities sharing a common social
event. The genre or format of the story is not limited by the
design of the system, though we use narratives of personal
experience in social events as the reference scenario. Other
applicable use scenarios include citizen journalism, self-
promotion, interactive exhibition, collective awareness, etc.
The system allows us to study and experiment with the
entire eco-system of online storytelling, from video capture
and annotation, through to discovery, editing and delivery. Figure 2 Online story authoring platform
The system also incorporates social context derived from An online editing tool for creative story authoring and
the analysis of social networks to improve user experience sharing. Conventional video editing tools such as Adobe
in creative editing. The synergy between social context Premiere provide rich editing tools and effects for offline
information and multimedia delivery applications is also professional editing. For online storytelling, story editors
exploited to improve media retrieval and delivery. can benefit more from direct referencing and editing of
SYSTEM OVERVIEW videos online (without having to download them first).
The eco-system is comprised of the following four A “lightweight” multimedia story-authoring engine suitable
components. for heterogeneous user devices and networks. The biggest
challenge of online storytelling using multimedia content is
the process and delivery of audio-visual content for
interactive user operations. An online story-authoring
system should aim to make online video editing as easy as
editing a shared text document and minimize the processing
and network load at user devices [1].
Integration of social context. Widely adopted social
networks greatly influence user preferences and activities.
The rich context information and social atmosphere
embedded in social media is crucial in improving user
Figure 1 Mobile application experience within social applications such as online
A mobile application to streamline the capturing, tagging, storytelling, particularly for live events. Figure 3 illustrates
sharing and browsing of user content. Metadata is essential the changing attributes and intensity of social interactions
for social sharing, but manual entry can be cumbersome during the life-cycle of a live event, and how integration of
during the live event, when users prefer to focus on the social context benefits storytelling at different stages of the
event.
3rd International Workshop on Interactive Content Consumption at
TVX’15, June 3rd, 2015, Brussels, Belgium.
spontaneously acted like a reporter and let the other group
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members talk about what had just happened.
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Social-context integration is effective in improving video
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annotation and in enhancing the search function during the
ec
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experiments. Using information from Twitter, an adaptive
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se
or
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event profiler (AEP) provides a list of related keywords and
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a metric to quantify the relevance for user search requests.
or
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Th
Th
Th
Fir
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An example for the search of “Schladming” is given below,
event intensity
with lower values representing higher relevance. The list
covers a range of items such as sport, location (planai
mountain), and popular competitors.
Related
keywords
of
“schladming”
1
-‐
slalom
-‐
0.601
time
2
-‐
planai
-‐
0.869
3
-‐
nightrace
-‐
0.964
Adaptive Event Profiler 4
-‐
hirscher
-‐
1.061
cold warm
5
-‐
neureuther
-‐
1.064
1. Start event profiling: Register location name & user-provided keywords
6
-‐
kristoffersen
-‐
1.073
2. Enrich video metadata: Suggest related tags based on current location 7
-‐
fisalpine
-‐
1.267
3. Enhanced search: Suggest related keywords based on location or user-provided keywords 8
-‐
h_kristoffersen
-‐
1.427
9
-‐
felixneureuther
-‐
1.622
Figure 3 Social trends 10
-‐
marcelhirscher
-‐
1.742
USER EXPERIMENTS
An experiment was arranged at Schladming, Austria during Because of AEP’s ability to recognize trending events, the
the Nightrace 2014 event to evaluate the storytelling integration of social context presents an ideal solution to the
system. This experiment examined how the design of classical “cold start” problem in content recommendation.
multimedia systems can help to facilitate social interaction, Given a user location, the storytelling system may suggest
and how the integration of social context improves user stories related to socially trending keywords nearby.
experiences within such a system. A number of test CONCLUSIONS
participants travelled from the UK and the Netherlands to Collaboratively authoring a story by joining shared
the venues prior to the event as the main storytellers while a multimedia content with different perspectives is becoming
few others joined the experiment from various locations in a popular way to enable collective user experience in live
the UK. Caching nodes were also installed in the UK, Italy, events. Our online multimedia storytelling eco-system
and the Netherlands to study the effectiveness of chunk enables the capturing, sharing, and authoring of user stories
caching for story playback. online with a low footprint, while an event-based user
experiment highlighted the contribution of social features to
enhancing the user experience of loosely collaborating
groups in content annotation, retrieval and media
distribution as part of a storytelling eco-system. We
witnessed the unique role of collaborative user creativity in
the entire development cycle of engaging social stories, and
we have shown that social context derived from social
media, location-based services and emerging mobile
technologies can also greatly improve the creative story
capturing and authoring process.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Figure 4 Storytelling experiments
The work presented is supported by the European
The consensus among the test participants is that
Commission within the FP7 Project STEER (grant no
storytelling of group experience of an event is “a very
318343).
natural thing to do”. Most participants found that using the
storytelling system for capturing and sharing their own REFERENCES
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feel that they were “telling a live story to their friends”. Kaptein, R., Taal, J. & Mori, L.. “Let’s share a story”:
They were mostly adding the narratives while recording by Socially-enhanced multimedia storytelling, In IEEE
talking to the microphone. Sometimes a member of a group Multimedia. 07/2015