Interactive TV Design Discussion - David Herigstad: Surface Space, Content Space, and Interactive Space

The following video is a presentation by Dale Herigstad, Chief Interaction Officer at Possible Worldwide, from the 2012 TV of Tomorrow Show.  If you are interested in interactivity and UX across screens and spaces, it is worth taking the time to watch!

WHO OWNS THE NEW SCREEN EXPERIENCES?

Special Presentation: Who Owns the New Screen Experiences? from TV of Tomorrow Show on Vimeo.

The "new world" combines TV and the internet, and poses new opportunities for design. Dale encourages flexibility and fearlessness, and setting goals for the long term. This means that organizations must move away from the "silo" approach, and create teams that can integrate across screens, platforms, content, and input methods, moving from flat-space to interactive, dynamic,layered, 3D, and augmented space.  

BTW, Dale Herigstad was one of the people commissioned by Steven Spielberg to work on the interface design for Minority Report.  

RELATED
Possible Worldwide
Tutorials: Dale Herigstad & Schematic, Interactive Design Agency
The Minority Report Interface
Luke Wroblewski, 9/23/04

Your Palm as Remote Controller (Video and Links)

Traditional remote controls for televisions and home media centers are particularly frustrating to use, in my opinion.  There are too many buttons, the buttons are too small, and it is easy to mess it all up.  (I've touched on this topic in a number of blog posts, such as UX of ITV: The User Experience and Interactive TV (or Let's Stamp Out Bad Remote Controls) and others, linked at the end of this post.)


There is hope for the future!  I'm happy to share a video about a method of remote control that might make interacting with my TV less annoying...and possibly pleasant! 


Researchers at the Technical University of Darmstadt have been working on a way for people to control their TV without a remote or hand-held device.  I think they are on the right path. The video shows how UI elements, mapped to the hand, can be touched, with accuracy, to interact eyes-free with a large-screen TV.  This work won the Best Paper award at EuroITV'12.


For more details, see Leveraging the Hand Surface as and Eyes-free TV Remote Control and the references below:
Niloofar Dezfuli, Mohammadreza Khalilbeigi, Jochen Huber, Florian Müller, and Max Mühlhäuser. 2012. PalmRC: Imaginary Palm-based Remote Control for Eyes-free Television Interaction. In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Interactive Television (EuroITV '12). ACM, New York, NY, USA, to appear. 


Niloofar Dezfuli, Mohammadreza Khalilbeigi, Jochen Huber, Florian Müller, and Max Mühlhäuser. 2012. Leveraging the palm surface as an eyes-free tv remote control. In Proceedings of the 2012 ACM annual conference extended abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems Extended Abstracts (CHI EA '12). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2483-2488. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2223656.2223823

SOMEWHAT RELATED
Oh! No! Sony's "Mother of Remote Controls" for Google TV
Interactive Multimedia Across Platforms and Screens: Adobe's Open Screen Project; MEX Mobile User Experience Manifesto... (Please don't annoy the user!)
Usability of a Remote Control
Quick Link:  The Remote - Death by Voice Control?

Lots of news about interactive TV: InteractiveTV Today.

Take a look!


INTERACTIVE TV NEWS ROUND-UP (VII): TVO, VERISIMO,  TECHSTORM, VISIWARE, FOX, WILL.I.AM, YOUVIEW


(I haven't finished looking at all of the round-ups and updates. There is a lot of convergence going on in the world of ITV.)

Quick Link: InteractiveTV Today website -lots of interesting things are happening in this converging field!

 http://itvt.com

From the "about us" section of the itvt.com website:

"Founded in 1998 by Tracy Swedlow and co-owned by Richard Washbourne, InteractiveTV Today [itvt] is the most widely read and trusted news source on the rapidly emerging medium of multiplatform, broadband interactive television (ITV).

We provide concise, original coverage of industry developments, technologies, content projects, and the people building the business to our readership, which is made up of hundreds of thousands of executives from around the world..."

Planet in Action's 3D Sound in Google Earth: Part of the Interactive, Touchable 3D Picture (and thoughts about how this might play out on interactive whiteboards in education)

I came across a link to Planet in Action's video demonstration of 3D sound in Google Earth, thanks to a post by Nate Torkington in O'Reilly Radar.  WOW!   


The company shows that a 3D sound engine works nicely within the Google Earth environment.  Planet in Action tweaked the Soundmanager2 library from schillmania.com, resulting in a sound3D javascript object that can be used to program geo-located sounds in Google Earth.


The 3D sound concept, in my opinion, will be useful in creating immersive interactive educational experiences, especially if students have access to newer interactive whiteboards with decent sound systems.    


Below is the video from Planet in Action, along with a bit of promotional information:

The video is of a port in San Sabastian, Spain.  The "sound landscape" is realistic, and a range of sounds, from various spots in the scene, can be heard during the exploration.  


"Google Earth is a highly detailed 3D representation of our entire planet.  Rather than just looking at it, why not play on it!  PlanetInAction.com brings you top quality ideas, applications and concepts that will let you experience your planet in a whole new way." -Planet in Action


Thoughts:

My bet is that this concept will play out very well in the future in family rooms outfitted with large displays and decent surround sound systems. 

Why?  No need to explain.  Just take a look at what is going on with 3D TV and film,  3D HD gaming, interactive TV, internet-enabled large HD TVs, Google's "Lean Back" concept, and the "Slow Media" movement.

By the way, Planet in Action's work strikes a chord in me.  One of my HCI team travel planning projects that used Google Earth in the demonstration prototype.  We focused on cruise travel planning, mostly because I had lots of pictures and video clips from my cruise trips vacations and other travels.  I even worked on part of the project while I was ON a cruise ship.  (That was before the economic downturn.)   Below is a video of a cruise ship model that Planet in Action created for a cruise line, for use in Google Earth:

Celebrity Constellation Virtual Fly-by


SOMEWHAT RELATED

As I mentioned in my previous post, "Video Experiments: Sea Life Medley - Extended version with music",  I'm experimenting with some ideas to create interactive educational video clips for future use on higher-resolution interactive whiteboards and other large touch-screen surfaces.   


Part of my motivation stems from an immediate need for "touchable" content for the students I work with who have more significant disabilities, including autism- and of course, my colleagues. All of the classrooms in the program have IWBs- mostly brand-new SMARTBoards - - we also have a SMARTTable that is begging for more content.


As I worked with students using my video clips and a new SMARTboard, I noticed that students have a strong desire to touch what they see on the screen.  If they could stop the video and further explore item of interest, for example, the jellyfish in the above picture, it would be great.  


Imagine putting your hand on the jellyfish, and having the power to explore it as a 3D model! If you are a grad student or researcher who is working on this concept, or something related, please let me know.


Getting back to the 3D landscapes/soundscapes in Google Earth- this is something that I'd like to try at school.  I'm wonder if PlanetinAction allows for touch-screen interaction so that students who are at the SMARTBoard can easily explore the 3D-sound enabled scenes in Google Earth.

Virtual Carol Singing Experiment on Britain's ITV, via Tracy Swedlow

ITV's "This Morning" Teams with YouTube on "Virtual Choir" Promotion -Tracy Swedlow

ITV, the U.K. Independent Television Network, is inviting viewers to participate in a virtual Christmas choir. If you want to participate download the headphone track, and sing "We Wish You a Merry Christmas". When you are ready, get out turn on your videocam, keep your headphones in, and sing along to the track. When you have finished, you'll upload the video to YouTube.

If you can follow the headphone track and sing the carol in tune, you might just have a chance to be seen as part of a montage of videos, either singing the carol in all at once with your virtual choir-mates, or as part of one carol sung by many people, one at a time.

How to participate:


ITV This Morning website

ITV This Morning YouTube Channel

UX of ITV: The User Experience and Interactive TV (or Let's Stamp Out Bad Remote Controls)

I prefer to watch our flat-panel HDTV in the dark, and usually I watch something I've DVR'd.  Because of the nature of my remote control, I often have to interrupt the immersive experience, turn on the light, poke at the buttons, and start over again.


Not long ago, I had the flu and I thought I'd try out the interactive channel from my satellite TV provider.  My interactive experience was about the same as interacting with the DVR!

What the satellite TV company offered was not really ITV.  It was BIRC.  Bad Interactive Remote Control.  You know what I'm talking about.  In the era of the WiiMote, most of us still have to interact with our TV systems as if were 1982.

There is hope!
A good number of researchers are working hard to make the UX of ITV, including mobile TV, a reality.   If you are reading this post, you most likely will appreciate some of the articles and links below:
Konstantinos Chorianopoulos. Research Methods in Interactive TV (pdf)
(Konstantinos Chorianopoulos is a lecturer and  Marie Curie Fellow in the Department of Informatics at the Ionian University, Corfu, Greece.  He founded UITV.INFO,  a site that has research and information about interactive television.)
Enhancing Social Sharing of Videos: Fragment, Annotate, Enrich, and Share (Proceedings of the 16th ACM international conference on Multimedia) Pablo Cesar, Dick C.A. Bulterman, David Geerts, Jack Jansen, Henrick Knoch and William Seager (This research paper includes a discussion of the concept of "personal secondary screens" on mobile devices that display information that can be shared and annotated while watching content on a large display.)


Sample of presentations and workshops at EuroITV 2009:
The Connected Home Redefines the TV Experience  Jan Van Bogaert (Alcatel-Lucent) 
The Internet Revolution Will Be Televised   Rich Exekiel (Yahoo! Conntected TV)
Needs, emotions, experience!  Marc Hassenahl (Folkwang University)
Marian F. Ursu, Pablo Cesar, and Doug Williams.Enhancing Social Communication and Belonging by Integrating TV Narrativity and Game Play
Rodrigo Laiola Guimaraes. Telling Stories and Commenting on Media:  The Next Generation of Multimedia Authoring Tools (pdf)
Ana Vitoria Joly.  Designing iTV Interfaces for Preschool Children
Claus Knudsen and Roel Puijk. Television and Presence: Experiments in interaction and mediation in a digital environment

Marianna Obrist, Henddrik Knoche, Damien Alliez Tutorial: User-Experience in TV-centric Services: What to consider in the Design and Evaluation?(pdf) 
David Geets Tutorial: Designing and Evaluating the Sociability of Interactive Television (pdf)
Artur Lugmayr Tutorial:  Ambient Media - An Introduction by Case-Studies(pdf)
Janez Zaletelj, Mladen Savic and Marko Meza. Real-time Viewer Feedback in the iTV production.
Skylla Janssen. Interactive Television Format Development – Could Participatory Design Bridge the Gap?
Jan Hess and Volker Wulf. Explore Social Behaviour around Rich-Media: A Structured Diary Study 
Dimitri Schuurman, Tom Evens and Lieven De Marez. A living lab research approach for mobile TV

RELATED 
Ana Vitoria Joly. Design and Evaluation of Interactive Cross-platform Applications for Pre-literate Children.  IDC 2007 Proceedings: Doctoral Consortium
Ana Vitoria Joly. Interactive Cross-platform Environments for Young Children (pdf)
C. Hesselman, W. Derks, J. Broekens, H. Eertink, M. Guelbahar, and R. Poortinga, "Facilitating an Open Ecosystem to Enhance Interactive TV Experiences", Workshop on Sharing Content and Experiences with Social Interactive Television, co-located with the European Interactive TV Conference (EuroITV2008), Salzburg, Austria, July 2008
R. Kernchen, P. Cesar, S. Meissner, M. Boussard, K. Moessner, C. Hesselman, and I. Vaishnavi, "Intelligent Multimedia Presentation Delivery in Ubiquitous Multi-Device Scenarios," IEEE MultiMedia (IEEE MM), 17(2), April-June, 2010 [in print]
P. Cesar, D.C.A. Bulterman, and J. Jansen, "Leveraging the User Impact: An Architecture for Secondary Screens Usage in an Interactive Television Environment," in Springer/ACM Multimedia Systems Journal (MSJ), 15(3): 127-142, 2009

P. Cesar, D.C.A. Bulterman, and Luiz Fernando Gomes Soares, "Introduction to special issue:  Human-centered television-directions in interactive digital television research"  ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications, October 2008

Somewhat Related
My preliminary thoughts about  Adobe's Open Screen project

Digital Convergence & Interactive Television

The idea of interactive television was born long before the Internet era, but it never really emerged.

Why? Television programming was designed to be the opposite of interactive. The medium centered around lulling viewers into passive submission, with mesmerized minds wide open to the influence of entertainers, talking heads, and commercials. All of this helped to perpetuate our growing consumer economy, which was not really a bad thing, right?

It appears that interactive television is re-emerging. Today, DISH Network announced the premiere of HISTORY Interactive, "an enhanced 24/7 interactive (iTV) experience." A collaboration between HISTORY and Ensequence, DISH TV customers with an OpenTV-enabled receivers can watch the Battles BC series beginning Monday, March 9 ET/PT.

So now what?

To get a better understanding of this concept, I dug up some information and found myself somewhat entertained by the process. Take a look:

Interactive Television: A Short History Interactive Television Alliance
(Scroll down to the history section)

A "must-see" gem from 1998:

Welcome to Digital TV: A Cringely Crash Course, Robert X. Cringely, 1998, PBS Online

This interactive presentation includes a nice overview of the history of television. It also includes a letter written in 1998 by the late Fred Rogers, of Mr. Roger's Neighborhood. I love this quote:

"...Imagine how much more meaningful any television can be when children have a caring person sitting right there beside them ... someone who wants to listen to their questions or comments ... someone who encourages their careful looking and listening and learning! That's what I call "interactive."

"We're glad to be your neighbors, and we applaud all the "interactive" ways you and your family are using television." -Fred Rogers

Interactive Television Production Mark Gawlinski, 2003

The Road to Convergence: Network Transformation and IP David Russell, Converge Digest, 5/17/06

Development and Current Issues of Interactive Television in the UK pdf Barbara Katz, 2004(?)

Blog: bitdamaged - Mike Ryan, Interactive Television Specialist

Translation Please: Broadband cable TV technology explained by Leslie Ellis
Leslie's blog is a treasure of technical information related to trends in broadband television. The information on the blog is well-organized and newer technologies are tagged as "Translation Please 2.0". Here are a few of Leslie's posts that I found interesting:

Translation Please 2.0: Digging Deeper into DSG 06/02/08
A Wireless Decoder for Wired People 7/28/08
What's Up in the Upstream 2/23/09
Widget World (Widgets on your Interactive TV)

RELATED
Another Gem for techies and the tech-curious:
ODEN: The OCAP/EBIF Developer Network
"Founded in 2007, the mission of the OCAP/EBIF Developer Network (OEDN) community is to drive awareness of and development efforts using the two primary interactive cable television open standards for middleware: OCAP (known to consumers as tru2way) and EBIF."

"As interactive television application development for cable is a (relatively) young field, the initial focus of OEDN is on sharing information and facilitating communication between those "in the know" and those who are new to interactive television development - especially academic researchers and university students. As the community grows and its needs mature, this site will support deeper collaboration."

Update to this post, including information about boxee