INTERMEDIA – “Interactive Media with Personal Networked Devices”

Overview

There have been considerable efforts to have Audio Video systems and applications converge, in particular in home environments with homes as spaces of convergence, and for nomadic users with advanced mobile devices as points of convergence. These trends are important but also have limitations that we seek to address and overcome: home-centric systems fail to account for increased mobility and the desire to provide continuous service across spatial boundaries outside the home; device-centric convergence, e.g. in 3G phones, supports nomadic use but provides a very limited user experience as no single device and interface will fit many different applications well.

In this NoE we seek to progress beyond home and device-centric convergence toward truly user-centric convergence of multimedia. Our vision is The User as Multimedia Central: the user as the point at which services (multimedia applications) and the means for interacting with them (devices and interfaces) converge. Key to our vision is that users are provided with a personalized interface and with personalized content independently of the particular set of physical devices they have available for interaction (on the body, or in their environment), and independently of the physical space in which they are situated. Our approach to this vision is to investigate a flexible wearable platform that supports dynamic composition of wearable devices, an ad-hoc connection to devices in the environment, a continuous access to multimedia networks, as well as adaptation of content to devices and user context.

MIRALab’s contribution

MIRALab, and Prof. Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann, is the coordinator of INTERMEDIA, and chairs the General Assembly as well as the Governing Board. Additionally, in the project MIRALab is also responsible for the installation of a web portal, for the organization of open forums, for the multimedia content sharing platform for the user-centric convergence, and will cooperate to the ontology model creation of INTERMEDIA, as well as the creation, annotation and organization of the audiovisual content according to the showcase scenario.

Partners

Carleton University
Canada
www.carleton.ca

Consiglio Nazionale Delle Ricerche
Italy
www.cnr.it

Ecole Polytechnique Féderale de Lausanne, Virtual Reality Laboratory (VRLab)
Switzerland
vrlab.epfl.ch

Fraunhofer Institut Angewandte Informationstechnik (FhG-FIT)
Germany
www.fit.fraunhofer.de/

Groupe des Ecoles des Telecommunication
France
www.get-telecom.fr

Industrial Systems Institute / Integrated Research Information Society (ISI)
Greece

Information and Communications University
Korea

Interdisciplinair instituut voor BreedBandTechnologie VZW (IBBT-MMLab)
Belgium

Intracom S.A. Telecom Solutions
Greece
www.intracom.gr

Kuratorium OFFIS e.V.
Germany

Lancaster University
U.K.
www.lancs.ac.uk/index.htm

MIRALab, University of Geneva
Switzerland
www.miralab.ch

Rheinisch Westfalische Technische Hochschule Aachen
Germany
www.rwth-aachen.de

Telefónica Investigación y Desarrollo Sociedad Anónima Unipersonal
Spain
www.telefonica.es/

Università di Genova – Dipartimento di Informatica Sistemistica e Telematica
Italy
www.dist.unige.it

Universität Klagenfurt
Austria
www.uni-klu.ac.at