The ACM International Conference on Interactive Experiences for Television and Online Video (ACM TVX), which is one of the leading conferences on interactive media and user experience, had been held on 5-7 June 2019 at Manchester’s MediaCityUK hub for technology innovation and creativity. The conference covered topics like immersive experiences, explorations of augmented, mixed and virtual reality, novel forms of content production and content consumption and user experience & interaction design.
The first workshop “Interactive Radio Experiences” (IRE) was organized on the 5th of June as a part of the Conference ACM TVX. Despite the increasingly interactive nature of radio experiences, the topic has been neglected so far at TVX and other conferences addressing interactive media. The workshop, jointly organised by the H2020-projects MARCONI and HRadio, brought together researchers, practitioners and experts to work together on tools, services and applications, that enable interactive radio experiences.
The workshop programme included four presentations of industry talks and short papers from broadcasters VRT and BBC, as well as R&D organisations (you are able to find the papers here). The workshop closed with a discussion, moderated by Werner Bailer, Key Researcher of Institute DIGITAL, on the challenges of interactive radio experiences: one major obstacle is the actual creation of content. Today, radio producers need to invest time to create additional content, ranging from adding metadata to visual materials, to interactive dramas. Enriching content with links, additional information, as well as structuring and navigation capabilities might serve as a first, realistic stepping stone in showcasing the potential of interactive radio experiences, while automation through machine learning technologies could enable cost-effective content creation in the near future.
Hannes Fassold, Senior Researcher of Institute DIGITAL, contributed to the conference with a poster and demonstration of results from the project Hyper360. Hyper360 aims at introducing a complete solution for the capture, production, enhancement, delivery and consumption of an innovative free viewpoint video (FVV) media format to the OTT media sectors, through careful validation and large demonstrations. Specifically, the research activities dealing with scene object extraction, automated cinematography and annotation of 360° video have been presented there.
ACM TVX 2019 https://tvx.acm.org/2019/
Projekt MARCONI https://www.projectmarconi.eu
HRadio www.hradio.eu
Hyper360 http://www.hyper360.eu/
IRE papers https://zenodo.org/communities/tvx2019ire