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The video game industry revolutionized the game market from the 1970s onwards. Stationary video game machines, such as “coin-ops” and, later, consoles for home entertainment made it possible to experience and interact with new virtual environments. Based on technical innovations, early video games already included different graphic and auditory effects that were used to present and emphasize the spatial dimension of game stories. One of the most famous and successful video game series that “told” spatial stories and included many visualizations of virtual topographies was Nintendo's Super Mario series. Nintendo developed diverse video game topographies including different interactive and animated cartographic media throughout the Super Mario series. These maps were early and fundamental examples that were user-friendly and suitable for children. Moreover, they established a basis for future video game spaces, and the techniques used to create, animate, and visualize these maps have also found their ways into other applications of cartography and geomatics. It seems that the early worlds of Super Mario animated cartographers to animate cartographic visualizations. This article presents the characteristic spatial structures and cartographic techniques found in early Super Mario games, from the arcade classic Donkey Kong (1981) to the Super Nintendo classic Super Mario Kart (1992). The meaning of these structures and techniques for other cartographic applications is discussed.

Brand placements in movies are common throughout the world. Within the last few years, 3D movie technology has experienced substantial growth in both cinemas and home entertainment. Furthermore, advanced cinemas also offer 4D experiences by adding scent, airflow or tactile stimuli to the 3D film. Based on the limited capacity model of information processing and the levels of processing effect theory, we conduct two studies to investigate how delivery modes of a 2D movie clip, compared to a 3D and a 4D (3D + scent) movie clip, influence recall and recognition of brands that are placed in either prominent or subtle ways. With regard to subtle placements, results from both studies demonstrate that the memory of subtle brand placements is negatively affected by the enhancement offered by 3D or 4D, as compared to 2D movies. With regard to prominent placements, results indicate that the memory of a highly prominent brand placement benefits from 3D, but not from 4D technology. This article addresses implications...

This paper discusses the implementation of high dynamic range in the coming generation of studio home entertainment video formats and the technical considerations that led to the adoption of a perceptually-tuned electro-optical transfer function for high dynamic range mastering and distribution. It also covers the value of display-referred systems based on a reference rendering versus historical scene-referred systems based on relative luminance and camera characteristics.

Multimedia (Images) are being generated at an enormous rate by sources such as defense and civilian satellites, biomedical imaging, military reconnaissance and surveillance flights and home entertainment systems, scientific experiments, fingerprinting and mug-shot-capturing devices. For example, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Earth Observing System will produce about 1 TB of image data per day when completely operational. A content- based image retrieval (CBIR) system is required to efficiently and competently use information from these image data sets. Such a system that helps users who is unfamiliar with the database can retrieve relevant images based on their contents.

After the first time I saw the Academy Award's “Best Picture” feature film Spotlight, I needed a few minutes to calm down. A gentleman sitting near me in the otherwise-empty weeknight theater asked...

A multi-user experience extending a standard TV content with AR elements is presented. It runs with both a standard tablet and a premium MR headset, the Microsoft HoloLens. A virtual TV mosaic is displayed around the TV screen and used as a GUI to control both TV and MR content. This paper focuses on the collaborative and personalized dimension offered by the experience. Unlike most AR applications, it can be simultaneously run by several users using different devices. The users can share content with others while keeping a personalized display. The added-value of such an extended TV experience has been demonstrated through complementary types of content, and user feedback confirms a real interest in this new kind of home entertainment, at the same time immersive, interactive, collaborative and personalized.

In the last years, the two networking paradigms Software Defined Networks (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), are driving the Internet evolution from a pure transport network, to a user-centric platform providing customers with different levels of quality according to their needs. By leveraging on these technologies, the European project INPUT has defined the concept of Personal Networks, an extension of the user's home Local Area Network (LAN), also including virtual images of physical devices. In this context, for many reasons that will be presented in the paper, it could be very useful to export a real hardware or software resource, that is physically or virtually located in the same Personal Network of a given user (e.g. a smart TV or a virtual set-top-box), to another Personal Network. With this in mind, this paper proposes the architecture that allows to instantiate a virtual presence in a Personal Network, in such a way that it allows using it as present locally in the visited personal network. The presented results are compliant with the SDN/NFV platform developed within the EU project INPUT.

In the last few years, network “softwarization” is gaining increasing popularity to achieve dynamicity and flexibility. Cloud computing, as well as the new paradigms of software defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV), are supporting this evolution. However, the need to move services closer to users to guarantee low latency in the service fruition on one hand, and the trend to support personalization of services on the other, are stimulating the migration of services toward edge nodes (in the so-called “fog computing” fashion). This is the target of the INPUT platform, proposed in the INPUT project to support future Internet personal cloud services in a more scalable and sustainable way, and with innovative added-value capabilities. The INPUT platform enables next-generation cloud applications to go beyond classical service models, and even replaces physical smart devices, usually placed in users’ homes (e.g., set-top-boxes, etc.), with virtual entities, providing them to users “as a Service.” In this paper, we present the INPUT paradigm and discuss a relevant use case—namely, the virtual set-top-box—adopted to prove the feasibility of the softwarized SDN/NFV paradigm jointly with the fog-computing approach for the support of personal cloud services. The INPUT platform is also compared with a legacy approach to evaluate the gain in terms of quality of experience for both static and mobile users.

With the gradual promotion of triple-place services and development of network technology, digital TV is gradually penetrating into daily life from conceptualization. Among them, the sharing of home entertainment information through multiple-screen interactive system is one of the most important components in digital home networks. This study firstly deeply analyzed the system architecture and functional units of DLNA; and then proposed one possible technical solution to implement multiple-screen interactive system in NGB TVOS1.0 based on DLNA agreement and characteristics of smart TV operating system. With this solution, multimedia resources like video, picture and music could be shared, controlled and managed among smart phone, personal computer and TV through network.

In order to leverage the use of various modalities such as audio-visual materials in instilling effective learning behavior we present an intuitive approach of annotation based hapto-audio-visual interaction with the traditional digital learning materials such as e-books. By integrating the home entertainment system in the user's reading experience combined with haptic interfaces we want to examine whether such augmentation of modalities influence the user's learning patterns. The proposed Haptic E--Book (HE-Book) system leverages the haptic jacket, haptic arm band as well as haptic sofa interfaces to receive haptic emotive signals wirelessly in the form of patterned vibrations of the actuators and expresses the learning material by incorporating image, video, 3D environment based augmented display in order to pave ways for intimate reading experience in the popular mobile e-book platform.

This paper presents a new database containing high-definition audio and video recordings in a rather unconstrained video-conferencing-like environment. The database consists of recordings of people sitting around a table in two separate rooms communicating and playing online games with each other. Extensive annotation of head positions, voice activity and word transcription has been performed on the dataset, making it especially useful for evaluating automatic speech-recognition, voice activity detection, speaker localisation, multi-face detection and tracking, and other audio-visual analysis algorithms.

Many video streaming applications and services exist on the Internet, and we covered several of them in part 1 of this article.1 The most important applications argu ably fall into the mobile and home entertainment categories, which span the range of video presentation formats for portable (PD), standard (SD), and high-definition (HD) video, and these applications include both walled-garden and Internet applications. They also operate on diverse networks, and use both managed and unmanaged end-to-end network services. Here, we identify mobile and home-streaming use cases, and consider the suitability of pull-based versus push-based adaptive streaming for each use case.

In August 2008, the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) established a task force to define the parameters of a stereoscopic 3D mastering standard for content viewed in the home. The project, called 3D to the Home, was the first step in propelling the 3D home entertainment industry forward by setting the stage for a standard that will enable 3D feature films and other programming to be played on fixed devices in the home, regardless of the delivery channel. With cross-industry participation and contribution, the task force defined the concept of a 3D Home Master, identified use cases from the perspective of various entities in the supply chain of the 3D content to the home, and developed requirements for the 3D Home Master. In March 2009, the task force completed its assignments and published its report, which will form the basis for developing actual format standards within SMPTE. This report has been distributed to other standards development organizations in support of their development of related distribution and presentation standards.

The Internet has become an extremely popular source of entertainment and information. But, despite the growing amount of media content, most Web sites today are designed for access via web browsers on the PC, making it difficult for home consumers to access Internet content on their TVs or other devices that lack keyboards. As a result, the Internet is generally restricted to access on the PC or via cumbersome interfaces on non-PC devices. In this paper, we present unobtrusive and assistive technologies enabling home users to easily find and access Internet content related to the TV program they are watching. Using these technologies, the user is now able to access relevant information and video content on the Internet while watching TV.

We propose a novel mobile system, called EchoTag, that enables phones to tag and remember indoor locations without requiring any additional sensors or pre-installed infrastructure. The main idea behind EchoTag is to actively generate acoustic signatures by transmitting a sound signal with a phone's speakers and sensing its reflections with the phone's microphones. This active sensing provides finer-grained control of the collected signatures than the widely-used passive sensing. For example, because the sensing signal is controlled by EchoTag, it can be intentionally chosen to enrich the sensed signatures and remove noises from useless reflections. Extensive experiments show that EchoTag distinguishes 11 tags at 1cm resolution with 98% accuracy and maintains 90% accuracy even a week after its training. With this accurate location tagging, one can realize many interesting applications, such as automatically turning on the silent mode of a phone when it is placed at a pre-defined location/area near the bed or streaming favorite songs to speakers if it is placed near a home entertainment system. Most participants of our usability study agree on the usefulness of EchoTag's potential applications and the adequacy of its sensing accuracy for supporting these applications.

This course is structured into three chapters that will introduce participants to (1) ambient intelligence principles applied to home entertainment, (2) augmented reality applications, and (3) gesture interaction design. Relevant examples from research and industry will be discussed.

This paper describes the system which provides home entertainment services to users using the middleware-cooperation module which makes UPnP and ACAP cooperate with each other. UPnP or ACAP providespowerful functionalities to its own network to play multimedia contents using its own resources. U one middleware uses the information and the resources of another middleware, itcould provide services with more contents and more powerful functionalities than those which it originally provides. This paper develops the middleware-cooperation module to make two middleware cooperate with each other and use resources of another middleware. The middleware-cooperation module makes UPnP and ACAP cooperate with each other, and it makes them share their information and resources without resource collision.

Over the next decade, we will encounter at least three major opportunities where success will hinge largely on our ability to define appropriate standards. That’s because intelligently crafted standards that surface at just the right time can do much to nurture nascent industries and encourage product development simply by creating a trusted and reliable basis for interoperability. From where I stand, the three specific areas I see as particularly promising are: (1) all telecommunications and computing capabilities that work together to facilitate collaborative work; (2) hybrid computing/home entertainment products providing for the online distribution of audio and/or video content; and (3) wireless sensor and network platforms (the sort that some hope the 802.15.4 and ZigBee Alliance standards will ultimately enable). No doubt there will be others, but for the purposes of this discussion, these should suffice.

This study evaluated young children's understanding of and ability to use an input device of the type associated with home-entertainment systems (like videogame players, DVD's, and other interactive systems that connect to a television set). These systems have the potential to serve as a powerful platform for delivering interactive educational programming to young children. However, the input controllers for these systems have proven extremely difficult for young children to use, as they typically require use of very small buttons that are close together, and arrow-based keys or joystick-like devices. To examine the potential for enabling young children to use such hardware devices, three adapted software interfaces were implemented. Eighty-four children, ranging in age from 36 to 59 months and from lower to lower-middle socio-economic status, participated in this study, using one of the three software interfaces to make simple on-screen choices. The results demonstrate that it is possible to enable presc...

In the last few years, stereoscopic developed very rapidly and employed in many different fields such as entertainment. Due to the importance of entertainment aspect of stereoscopic 3D (S3D) applications, a review of the current state of S3D development in entertainment technology is conducted. In this paper, a novel survey of the stereoscopic entertainment aspects is presented by discussing the significant development of a 3D cinema, the major development of 3DTV, the issues related to 3D video content and 3D video games. Moreover, we reviewed some problems that can be caused in the viewers’ visual system from watching stereoscopic contents. Some stereoscopic viewers are not satisfied as they are frustrated from wearing glasses, have visual fatigue, complain from unavailability of 3D contents, and/or complain from some sickness. Therefore, we will discuss stereoscopic visual discomfort and to what extend the viewer will have an eye fatigue while watching 3D contents or playing 3D games. The suggested solutions in the literature for this problem are discussed. Demonstrate the latest stereoscopic applications and devices

Microprocessors and miniaturized components, which have filtered into so many aspects of daily life, are now poised to sweep through passenger planes, leaving a plethora of high-tech amenities in their wake. Travelers will soon enjoy audio and video on demand, along with in-seat movies, video games, catalog shopping, phones and faxing, e-mail and Internet access. Airliners will provide a complete home entertainment system and mobile office for each passenger seat.

Burgeoning consumer products and services provided through cable, television, and the World Wide Web (WWW) make it challenging for consumers to organize and use their home entertainment and information centers. Assuming that this large amount of home entertainment multimedia information will come to consumers' homes through a television or a television-like device, the Spatial Browsing project explores a 3D interface solution to multimedia database browsing and searching. Philips Research in Briarcliff, New York is developing various algorithms for browsing and retrieving information in large multimedia databases. As a design research effort, the Spatial Browsing project further augments the available in-house technology in developing user interface design concepts for interacting with such databases.

In this paper, we design and implement a novel all-in-one Media Center that can be directly connected to a high-definition television (HDTV). C# programming is used for developing modular structured media center for home entertainment. Therefore it is possible and easy to add new limitless number of modules and software components. The most importantly, user interface is designed by considering two important factors; simplicity and tidiness. Proposed media center provides opportunities to users to have an experience on listening to music/radio, watching TV, connecting to Internet, online Internet videos, editing videos, Internet connection to pharmacy on duty, checking weather conditions, song lyrics, CD/DVD burning, connecting to Wikipedia. All the modules and design steps are explained in details for user friendly cost effective all-in-one media center.

Home entertainment systems comprising multiple TV screens offer new opportunities to display more content, accommodate more viewers, and deliver enriched user experiences. In many cases, such installations take the form of mixed-reality environments, in which video projections coexist with physical TV sets. We refer to such installations as interactive TV potpourris, due to their composite nature of hybridizing individual TV screens of different natures, form factors, and potential to render different multimedia types. This work discusses current implementations for interactive TV potpourris, identifies technical and interaction challenges, and pinpoints future research and development directions. It is our hope that this work will encourage new explorations and developments of TV potpourris.

Internet-enabled television systems, often referred to as Smart TVs, are a new development in television and home entertainment technologies. In this work, we propose a new, privacy-preserving, approach for Television Audience Measurement (TAM), utilizing the capabilities of the Smart TV technologies. We propose a novel application to calculate aggregate audience measurements using Smart TV computation capabilities and permanent Internet access. Cryptographic techniques, including homomorphic encryption and zero-knowledge proofs, are used to ensure both that the privacy of the participating individuals is preserved and that the computed results are valid. Additionally, participants can be compensated for sharing their information. Preliminary experimental results on an Android-based Smart TV platform show the viability of the approach.

‘Interactive multimedia’ was, only a few years ago, just a fuzzy shape on the horizon of new technology. With rapid developments in computing, telecommunications and home entertainment, interactive multimedia now describes a range of products for corporate and consumer markets which — after more than a decade of promise and potential — are setting standards for the decade to come. A handful of products are of particular interest to libraries now; however, a wide range of products and issues, from electronic books and computer games to compression technology and networking, will profoundly influence the future of publishing and communications. This article identifies some of the key issues and platforms including interactive video (IV), multimedia computers, electronic books, and optical discs in the LaserDisc and compact disc (CD) formats.

This chapter contains sections titled: Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) MPEG Industry Forum (MPEGIF) Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) 3D Home Entertainment Task Force Rapporteur Group On 3DTV of ITU-R Study Group 6 TM-3D-SM Group of Digital Video Broadcast (DVB) Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) HDMI Licensing, LLC Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA) Other Advocacy Entities References

Advances in embedded computing technologies has led to the development of residential gateways, and home automation systems. Installation and maintenance costs associated with such systems, however, are still relatively high. In addition, these systems have largely concentrated on applications such as control of multi-media home entertainment systems, domestic appliance control and automatic scene selection for dinners and parties. This paper presents a Lifestyle system that serves a much wider application range, yet at low cost. The system targets home automation, security, and elderly/disabled care markets.

This paper introduces an interactive game environment for the use in home entertainment systems. It is based on a software framework that was originally developed for scientific, dynamical simulation of autonomous robots. The paper describes the overall concept, some of the used technologies and implementation details.

Embedded network devices have become an ubiquitous fixture in the modern home, office as well as in the global communication infrastructure. Devices like routers, NAS appliances, home entertainment appliances, wifi access points, web cams, VoIP appliances, print servers and video conferencing units reside on the same networks as our personal computers and enterprise servers and together form our world-wide communication infrastructure. Widely deployed and often misconfigured, they constitute highly attractive targets for exploitation. In this study we present the results of a vulnerability assessment of embedded network devices within the world's largest ISPs and civilian networks, spanning North America, Europe and Asia. The observed data confirms the intuition that these devices are indeed vulnerable to trivial attacks and that such devices can be found throughout the world in large numbers.

This article is an invited talk regarding the software testing for home entertainment and multimedia.

Multimedia devices, services, and content are already distributed inside the home network. Mobility, sharing and IP based delivery mechanisms introduce additional challenges to accessibility by extending the range of distribution into interconnected home and Internet scale scenarios. However, the user should be able to access any of these targets in a satisfying, easy, and uniform way despite the differences in target and interaction device technologies. This paper proposes and demonstrates how RESTful and declarative approach could be used in solving extended accessibility and usability problems. In the proposed solution, the network becomes the media center, as one of the networked devices operates as a hub between targets and UI devices, while the actual media is streamed in out of band P2P fashion.

In the beginning, there was mono. Everything we heard was stored in and reproduced from a single channel. In those early days, listeners enthused, and critics applauded the efforts of Edison, Berliner, and others as being the closest possible to reality. They were wrong, but a revolution in home entertainment had taken place.

In 1986, according to Task Force Pro Libra (TFPL) data, there were 48 information CD‐ROMs in existence. The phenomenal growth of this outgrowth from the home entertainment music industry has been tracked by TFPL as it has compiled its directories over the past years. The rate of growth can be seen from the following table

Home entertainment components usually come with remote controls as user interfaces. When combining components from different vendors, customers end up with a zoo of remote controls at their coffee tables. Most conventional approaches aiming to solve this problem, use some kind of graphical user interface allowing the user to browse through the various functions of each device. Meanwhile, research in speech technology has reached a state where it becomes suitable for the mass market. In this paper, we present a test bed as well as the results of several tests, which we have conducted to elucidate the idea of speech control for spontaneously networked home entertainment systems. Short conclusion: ubiquitous computing and speech control complement each other very sufficiently

Today?s multimedia systems use different types of media with different play-out devices. Currently we are heading towards a situation where for example cellular content providers, the home entertainment industry and networked multimedia over the Internet provide different content and different formats that are incompatible with devices from the other systems. This is in stark contrast with the current trend in the distributed systems and Internet communities where consolidation and interoperation of heterogeneous technologies is a prime target. If the vision of a future integration of different multimedia capable devices should become reality, we must Consolidate the usage of multimedia objects and enable each player to use the different formats. This paper suggests a method and system to achieve such consolidation. We present our initial work and prototyping and aim at stirring a debate around the system to stimulate interest and future research.

COTS — Commercial Off-The-Shelf items — used in electronic military systems present advantages of being state-of-the-art technology, low cost and readily available on the market. Demand to reduce design lead-time and minimize cost bring on an increasing trend to use COTS in military applications. COTS manufacturers design the parts for moderate environmental conditions, which characterizes consumer goods, computers, telecommunications, and home entertainment industries. Military systems require reliable, high quality performance and survival in harsh environment. Therefore, in order to asses the potential risks of COTS implementations in military applications, it is necessary to be acquainted with the parts environmental specifications. This paper presents a survey of mechanical and environmental specifications as presented in various data sheets, by the manufacturers. Observations and concerns results of observations will be presented about issues that have to be addressed in the process of using COTS in military systems.

This article discusses the potential application of augmented reality (AR) in the creation of future interactive entertainment experiences. It describes the production of prototypes using ARToolkit that use physically manipulated AR within television broadcast production and in home entertainment for children.

In future domestic environments, we will have various home appliances that are connected to home networks. Connecting these appliances requires middleware for providing high level functionalities that hides details of complex issues about respective home appliances. The middleware should be simple and extensible. Also, the middleware needs to access various services on the Internet in an easy way because it is very important to provide future home entertainments that access Internet services.In this paper, we show our Web-based middleware for home computing environments. Recently, many companies have announced to sell Web-based home appliances. Our middleware enables us to integrate these appliances without their modifications. Also, our middleware allows us to build attractive future home applications that are connected to the Internet. We also show some experiences with our current prototypes and describe current ongoing work to improve the current system.

In this paper, we examine the requirements for future middleware to support mobile and pervasive applications and identify key research areas. We illustrate the research areas with requirements identified in two specific research projects concerning pervasive healthcare and home entertainment.

In this paper we outline the design and the implementation of the multimodal presentation planner PMO, which is part of the EMBASSI intelligent user interface for home entertainment devices. We provide details about the concepts we use to produce cohesive and coherent output as well as illustrate the software architecture of the PMO. We compare our approach with the state of the art in presentation planning and conclude with an illustration of our future work.

In order to be successful in the home, micro-display technologies face significant challenges to displace conventional CRT solutions. Besides needing to offer a unique value to the end-user, micro-displays must be cost competitive and offer equivalent or better video reproduction performance. We will review our results in the basic requirements to succeed in the home environment. We have developed several technologies to advance DMDTM technology to meet those requirements including high speed interfaces that enable virtual elimination of color sequential artifacts, improved contrast, and package cost reduction.

As a result of the fast growth of population exposure to the electromagnetic fields (EMF) there should be increased attention to protection against adverse effects of the fields. The main aspects of the protection are: general public, work safety, biosphere as a whole, lithosphere and devices and systems. Not only the natural world but also any man-made device and system is potentially susceptible to EMF. It may be said, in some simplification, that there is hardly no device or system, especially electric-or electronic one, that would not be affected by direct or indirect EMF irradiation. A good example of the immunity of an electric car for the disabled was shown in a movie demonstrated by Howard Bassen during BEMS Meeting in Copenhagen in 1994. The author has presented at EMC Symposia several papers on the susceptibility of the home entertainment electronic devices1. To illustrate it in Fig.l a susceptibility limit of a multimeter is shown. The immunity is the reason why aboard a plane we are asked not to use any electronic devices, even laptop computers. Presently we are requested, but in the near future we may face more serious problems if we decide to use them2.

Technology develops rapidly, but the psychological and emotional make-up of people changes only imperceptibly. Therefore the effects on the viewers, described in the previous chapter, cannot be altered by satellite broadcasts, laser beam systems, or wall projections in your own future “home entertainment center.”

In this paper, the author presents a biography of entrepreneur Scott Jones, describes how Jones built a better voicemail system and how he now hopes to do the same for home entertainment.

The synergy between computing and information systems promises to herald a new epoch in which users not only have access to mundane services, such as television, radio, and telephones, but they also have access to an entirely new variety of entertainment services that are automatically customized to suit their individual needs. The authors explore the architectural considerations that underlie the realization of personalized multimedia entertainment services over metropolitan-area broadband networks, and devise near-optimal information caching strategies to determine when, where, and for how long video programs must be cached, so as to minimize the cumulative storage and network costs borne by users. >

Interest in multimedia applications has risen dramatically of late, in large measure due to significant advances in key enabling technologies and the rapid convergence of telephone, cable TV, and entertainment conglomerates. While the mass-media has focused very tightly on the impact of these developments on the home entertainment industry, it seems that, somewhere lost in the shuffle, has been a broad class of services centered on multimedia business communications. Based on a strong belief that such services can significantly improve company communications at many levels, we have been targeting our research to explore potential applications and enabling technologies relevant to this market segment. The paper presents a broad discussion of first-hand experiences of developing distributed multimedia applications. The authors describe several of the business-oriented applications they have constructed and some of the tools and techniques developed to assist in the process. They also discuss some of their latest experiences with high-speed networking technology (specifically ATM) for supporting distributed multimedia applications. >