Digital Entertainment and Media

Home entertainment is an important aspect of our leisure time. The increasing deployment of digital computation and communication technologies into the home provides new opportunities for home entertainment, but also new challenges. For example, we need to explore the new affordances of digital entertainment so that we take fullest advantage of the opportunities of this new medium; we must ensure that new digital applications can be used easily by householders without extensive training or expertise; we must also ensure that new connected entertainment applications do not ex-pose householders to new privacy or security risks (malicious access to photographs or videos stored on the home network, for example). We are interested in developing novel entertainment and media applications that take fullest advantage of the opportunities provided by digital me-dia, along with the technical infrastructure necessary to make them work, simply and securely. As we introduce more technologies into the home, we do not want to change the important characteristic of home life: to relax and enjoy family events. Currently, the influx of technology into the home has produced an increased burden to manage that infrastructure and guard against new security threats. By considering the importance of the human experience in managing technology and maintaining control and privacy, we are showing how a state-of-the-art experience can also be an enjoyable one.

Some possible outcomes from this theme in the first year include:
• New tools for capturing and organizing the meaningful moments of everyday life, and then facilitating storytelling using these captured media
• Mechanisms for easy content sharing between homes—for example, to allow secure photo sharing among family members that are at a distance from one another
• New forms of network gaming, including games that promote well-being such as exercise-based games
• Prototype new media streaming architectures and applications, to allow easy access to purchased or self-created content throughout the home
• Interactive tools to facilitate easier control over media devices in the home
• Empirical studies of homeowners’ needs and desires with respect to home entertainment and media

Projects

Gesture Pendant
The Gesture Pendant allows ordinary household devices to be controlled, literally, with the wave of a hand. The user wears a small pendant that contains a wireless camera. The user makes gestures in front of the pendant that control anything from a home theater system, to lighting, to the kitchen sink.
http://www.imtc.gatech.edu/projects/archives/gesture_p.html

Videotater: Video Segmentation and Tagging
Nick Diakopoulos, Irfan Essa
Videotater embodies a set of approaches toward visualization and interaction on a Tablet PC for the efficient and intuitive navigation, selection, segmentation, and tagging of digital video. Our veridical representation immediately signals to the user where appropriate segment boundaries should be placed and allows for rapid review and refinement of manually or automatically generated segments. Finally, we explore a distribution of modalities in the interface by using multiple timeline representations, pressure sensing, and a tag painting/erasing metaphor with the pen.
http://www-static.cc.gatech.edu/grads/d/Nicholas.Diakopoulos/Projects/Videotater/index.html

Photo Collage/ Collaginator
Nick Diakopoulo, Irfan Essa
Authoring collages from a large collection of digital photographs can be quite tedious. In this work we present an approach that supports the efficient construction of a photo collage by assisting the user with an automatic layout procedure that can be controlled at a high level. Our method makes use of a layout algorithm that optimizes a set of naturally specified user constraints according to metadata attached to the photos.
http://www-static.cc.gatech.edu/grads/d/Nicholas.Diakopoulos/Projects/CollageBrowser/index.html

Family Video Archive
Shwetak Patel, Zhigang Hua, Gregory Abowd
The Family Video Archive helps in organizing and retrieving home videos. You can annotate video files with metadata and use this data to find the ones you are looking for. Includes work on the Context Cam for automatically annotating videos at the point of capture.
http://swiki.cc.gatech.edu:8080/ahome/97



Exergaming
Allison Sall, Beki Grinter
Recently games such as Dance Dance Revolution have left the arcade and entered the home. Sometimes purchased for “exergaming”—exercising through gaming—these games have to live in the home. Our question in this project is how do games that were designed for the arcade, fit into the home, and what does it take to incorporate gaming into the living space.