ABSTRACT
The Web is rapidly moving towards a platform for mass
collaboration in content production and consumption from three screens:
computers, mobile phones, and TVs. While there has been a surge of interests in
making Web content accessible from mobile devices, there is a significant lack
of progress when it comes to making the web experience suitable for viewing on
a television. Towards this end, we describe a novel concept, namely GeoTV,
where we explore a framework by which web content can be presented or pushed in
a meaningful manner to create an entertainment experience for the TV audience.
Fresh content on a variety of topics, people, and places is being created and
made available on the Web at breathtaking speed. Navigating fresh content
effectively on TV demands a new browsing paradigm that requires fewer mouse
clicks or user interactions from the remote control. Novel geospatial and temporal browsing
techniques are provided in GeoTV that allow users the capability of aggregating
and navigating RSS-enabled content in a timely, personalized and automatic
manner for viewing in an IPTV environment. This poster is an extension of our
previous work on GeoTracker that utilizes both a geospatial representation and a
temporal (chronological) presentation to help users spot the most relevant updates
quickly within the context of a Web-enabled environment. We demonstrate 1) the usability
of such a tool that greatly enhances a user’s ability in locating and browsing
videos based on his or her geographical interests and 2) various innovative
interface designs for showing RSS-enabled information in an IPTV environment.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
H.4.3 [Communication
Applications]: Information Browsers.
General Terms
Experimentation, Human Factors, Languages.
Keywords
RSS, IPTV, geospatial tagging, blog, multimedia.
1. INTRODUCTION
RSS (Really Simple
Syndication) [1] technologies and web logs (a.k.a. blogs) have helped
transform the Web into a service platform that allows normal Web users to
compete with traditional news media for timely content publication,
aggregation, and delivery. However, there is a significant lack of progress
when it comes to presenting similar information to TV viewers. Web users are equipped
with various browsing capabilities, while TV users have traditionally been
limited to a remote control and a fixed set of channels. This restriction is a
significant barrier towards providing a seamless experience to access the same
Web content on three screens: computers, mobile phones, and TVs. In general,
the inquisitive nature of users point to the fact that they are not satisfied
with simply finding out about X , but are also interested in finding out what’s new about X, whether X is a
person, a place, an event, a topic, or any entity. And users’ intentions should
not be restricted by the media they are using, whether it is a computer monitor
or a TV screen.
In this poster, we present GeoTV, a framework for aggregating and visualizing RSS feeds in a geospatial and temporal manner suited for a television experience, a major departure from the traditional text-based newspaper layout, which is still the dominant style on most web sites. Our contributions are specifically (a) Presenting innovative interfaces of geocoded RSS data along both geospatial and temporal dimensions for a TV experience and (b) Conducting usability studies for such interfaces.
2. RSS Navigation
Navigating RSS content is typically performed today on the Web using RSS-aware programs called readers. They are usually available as stand-alone programs or extensions to web browsers (plugins). The readers fetch recent updates periodically from a list of user-subscribed sites and alert the users accordingly. A user is typically notified of recent updates by means of a popup window showing a short textual description of the RSS item. By geolocating RSS, we mean associating RSS items on a world map where we perform reverse mapping of each story to one or more locations. The reader is referred to our previous work, GeoTracker [2], for more details. In this poster, we extend some of these ideas for the IPTV environment and show some innovative user interfaces specifically designed for the TV audience.
2.1 RSS Navigation on the Web
With a user profile that stores the user’s interests,
we can personalize a user’s browsing or viewing experience by highlighting
events and presenting associated multimedia items that match his or her
geographic interests. For example, Figure 1 shows the locations that correspond to Yahoo top news
items using the GeoTracker Web interface. Yahoo generates RSS feeds segmented
by categories, one of which corresponds to breaking news items. The interface allows users to zoom in and out
of any area and to pan from one side to the other easily. The zoom and pan
features are capabilities that we inherit from Google Maps. Many such mashup websites using the same
Google API [3] are now available. Clicking on the pin on
Figure 1 - Geolocation of international top stories from Yahoo RSS feeds using GeoTracker web interface
Figure 2 - Web content displayed on TV with varying importance
2.2 RSS Navigation on TV
Figure 2 shows an alternative
representation by listing the hot spots
ordered by freshness or frequency. As a TV user may not be able to point to a
location with a mouse, this interface allows the user to simply select a number
or scroll using his remote to obtain a video (if available) corresponding to
that location and to obtain associated RSS text as a ticker on the bottom of
that video feed (when available). We focus on the capability of allowing a user
to browse hot spots by scrolling down the side bar locations listing.
Navigation is enabled using either a remote control or a software control (see
bottom right). The image shows a snapshot of a Baghdad
story with an inset picture-in-picture of a news item from Berlin
As another example, Figure 3 illustrates the concept of integrated blogs and geomapping. Often, as
information is presented on a news site, the real time dynamics on how the
event and public opinions evolved over time is lost. With the introduction of
RSS, a dynamic presentation can offer the realism of experiencing a breaking
news event. This example shows the geomap of the famous head butting incident
of Zidane. As this incident was unfolding, blog sites were capturing comments
from across the world. The integration is illustrated in the form of a U-shaped
bar where the blog opinions (compiled based on the user’s profile) are updated
and aligned on the left of the geomap (after a user profile is selected) while
the bottom shows the selected RSS feed being mapped. Relevant images from
various blogs are also shown to the right of the map.
Figure 3 - The U-Bar concept – a personalized integrated blog
and map
2.3 Usability Study of GeoTV
Finally,
we have on-going usability studies on GeoTV and we will present results of
those studies in the poster presentation. TV users are accustomed to motion in
the interface, hence it is recommended to incorporate dynamic elements in the
interface. WebTV used a proxy filtering
architecture, which took care of cursor control and highlighting [4].
Unfortunately, the new generation, such as Microsoft’s Media Center
Edition/IPTV, does not provide this capability, thus requiring applications to
take care of the complexity. We propose an automated panning and zooming effect
(a two-dimensional translational mapping) to allow the user to view map regions
of interest in detail in a lean-back consumption modality. This would be one
way to overcome the low screen resolution limitations (e.g., 240 lines for
interlaced standard definition NTSC).
3. REFERENCES
[3]
http://www.programmableweb.com/tag/mapping
J. Nielsen, “WebTV usability review”, http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9702a.html