An Extendible Multimedia System to Create an Enriched and Common User Experience
Abstract
On the Internet today, big amounts of multimedia content is available from many different sources, and metadata descriptions are essential when one want to find the media items that are related to each other. Different media items (being image, video, audio, web page etc.) may all contain different supplementing pieces of information for a common topic. Potentially, when watching a video annotated with temporal metadata, the experience can be enriched when other relevant media are continuously being presented. What if you also can have a simultaneous experience of this multimedia presentation together with a friend located in another city, or even country? The result will be an enriched and shared common interactive experience, in addition to the ordinary multimedia experience. This master thesis presents a proof-of-concept system to create such an experience. The first part of the project investigates the current status of e-learning and multimedia systems, and an evaluation of relevant technology to be used. The second part includes the requirement specification, design and implementation of the system. Focus of the work has been on the following four areas: presentation of a video stream and additional related media to the user, making it possible for the users to interact with the computer and each other, synchronizing the multimedia experience to create a shared common experience, and finally use metadata to find relations between pieces of content to create the enriched experience. Our contribution is first and foremost the design and implementation of the integration and interaction between the four concepts; presentation, interaction, synchronization and metadata -- with emphasis on metadata as the ubiquitous drive force used to bind it all together. The aim is a system that can be used as foundation for further research within several areas, such as automatic enrichment and shared common experience.