Glorianna Davenport

Cinematic primitives for multimedia

The development of robust frameworks in interactive multimedia for representing story elements to the machine so that they can be retrieved in multiple contexts is addressed. Interactive multimedia is discussed as a user-directed form of storytelling, and the nature of cinematic storytelling is examined. It is proposed that content can be represented in layers. This model for layered information will allow programs to take advantage of the relation between cinematic sequences and the world they represent. The collection of content by the camera and microphone is considered in this context. The use of the methodology to build meaningful, context-rich sequences is discussed.<<ETX>>

Virtual video editing in interactive multimedia applications

Drawing examples from four interrelated sets of multimedia tools and applications under development at MIT, the authors examine the role of digitized video in the areas of entertainment, learning, research, and communication.

Unraveling the Taste Fabric of Social Networks

Popular online social networks such as Friendster and MySpace do more than simply reveal the superficial structure of social connectedness — the rich meanings bottled within social network profiles themselves imply deeper patterns of culture and taste. If these latent semantic fabrics of taste could be harvested formally, the resultant resource would afford completely novel ways for representing and reasoning about web users and people in general. This paper narrates the theory and technique of such a feat — the natural language text of 100,000 social network profiles were captured, mapped into a diverse ontology of music, books, films, foods, etc., and machine learning was applied to infer a semantic fabric of taste. Taste fabrics bring us closer to improvisational manipulations of meaning, and afford us at least three semantic functions — the creation of semantically flexible user representations, cross-domain taste-based recommendation, and the computation of taste-similarity between people — whose use cases are demonstrated within the context of three applications — the InterestMap, Ambient Semantics, and IdentityMirror. Finally, we evaluate the quality of the taste fabrics, and distill from this research reusable methodologies and techniques of consequence to the semantic mining and Semantic Web communities.

Tangible viewpoints: a physical approach to multimedia stories

We present a multimedia storytelling system that couples a tangible interface with a multiple viewpoint approach to interactive narratives. Over the centuries, stories have moved from the physical environment (around campfires and on the stage), to the printed page, then to movie, television and computer screens. Today, using wireless and tag sensing technologies, storytellers are able to bring digital stories back into our physical environment. The Tangible Viewpoints system explores how physical objects and augmented surfaces can be used as tangible embodiments of different character perspectives in an interactive tale. These graspable surrogates provide a direct mode of navigation to the story world, a means of bridging the gap between cyberspace and our physical environment as we engage with digital stories. The system supports stories told in a range of media, including audio, video, still image and text.In this paper, we first provide a context for Tangible Viewpoints based on research in the areas of tangible interfaces and interactive narratives. We then offer an overview of the Tangible Viewpoints functionality, and explain the design and implementation of the system. The current system has been used in two storytelling projects. We discuss each one, and look at how user feedback has affected or will affect further development. We conclude by suggesting several future applications for the Tangible Viewpoints interface.

ConText towards the evolving documentary

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Automatist storyteller systems and the shifting sands of story

We present a novel approach to documentary storytelling that celebrates electronic narrative as a process in which the author(s), a networked presentation system, and the audience actively collaborate in the co-construction of meaning. A spreading-activation network is used to select relevant story elements from a multimedia database and dynamically conjoin them into an appealing, coherent narrative presentation. The flow of positive or negative “energies” through associative keyword links determines which story materials are presented as especially relevant “next steps” and which ones recede into the background, out of sight. The associative nature of this navigation serves to enhance meaning while preserving narrative continuity. This approach is well-suited for the telling of stories that—because of their complexity, breadth, or bulk—are best communicated through variable-presentation systems. Connected to the narrative engine through rich feedback loops and intuitively understandable interfaces, the audience becomes an active partner in the shaping and presentation of story.

Numbers-a medium that counts (spreadsheet software)

The use of spreadsheets to bring hypermedia to the office is proposed. It is argued that the numeric cell is a powerful generic object type, and its use is explored. The application of Hypercalc (a prototype hypermedia spreadsheet constructed by combining an authoring interface with a series of video device drivers written for Informixs Wingz, a graphical spreadsheet with a built-in scripting language) to a business case study is described. The tools of the resulting environment, called Hypercase, are discussed. The limitations of the traditional monomedia approach to business case studies are outlined.<<ETX>>

M-Studio: an authoring application for context-aware multimedia

Broadband wireless networks coupled with handheld computers and appropriate sensing technologies provide a channel for the delivery of mobile cinema. Mobile cinema changes the consumer experience of motion picture stories in that discrete cinematic sequences are delivered based on the consumers location and the a story-real-time metric. The M-Studio authoring tool helps mobile story creators design, simulate and adjust mobile narratives. The tool provides the author with a graphical manipulation interface for linking content with a specific geographical space and a simulator allows the author to evaluate and iterate the content for continuity of story threads as they may be presented. The tool directly generates the code that is required for the server to deliver the cinematic sequences appropriately. This tool is discussed in the context of the two mobile narratives that have been created.

Video streamer

Motion images are usually conveyed full-screen, coming to life through a rapid sequence of individual frames. The tools presented here allow a viewer to step back from the full-screen view to gain perspective of time, and then to transfer from sequential image streams to collages of parallel images. The Video Streamer presents motion picture time as a three dimensional block of images flowing away from us in distance and in time. The Streamer’s rendering reveals a number of temporal aspects of a video stream. The accompanying shot parser automatically segments any given video smeam into separate shots, as the streamer flows. The Collage provides an environment for arranging clips plucked from a sequential stream as associations of parallel elements. This process of arranging motion images is posed as an engaging viewing activity. The focus is on viewing utensils, but these tools provide an alternative perspective to video elements that also has bearingon editing.

Documenting life: videography and common sense

This paper introduces a model for producing common sense metadata during video capture and describes how this technique can have a positive impact on content capture, representation, and presentation. Metadata entered into the system at the moment of capture is used to generate suggestions designed to help the videographer decide what to shoot, how to compose a shot and how to index their video material to best support their communication requirements. An approach and first experiments using a common sense database and reasoning techniques to support a partnership between the camera and videographer during video capture are presented.