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 ts en d om te members talk about what had just happened. ea m cr o de re sa vi ed Social-context integration is effective in improving video ie ng rd ed or di co ed ur St or re pt rd w annotation and in enhancing the search function during the ec e ca ne d o ar tr c te re e ar or ts ea ar e en st experiments. Using information from Twitter, an adaptive d cr ts ar te ts om en is ts an di y en om M se or ip t event profiler (AEP) provides a list of related keywords and om en e tic St yi m or Ev or ar st m st m fir tp st la n e en a metric to quantify the relevance for user search requests. or ai e e e s Th Th Th Fir Ev M M 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 creations throughout the course of a live event made them 1. Mu, M., Simpson, S., Race, N., Niamut, O., Koot, G., feel that they were “telling a live story to their friends”. 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