Applications and Usability of Interactive Television

Today, television is not just a device; with new mobile devices, smartphones and tablets, together with the advent of streaming video platforms, the concept of television is an entire ecosystem in which all the elements of HW, SW and broadcast channels intermingle to provide a new version of entertainment. This article will review real cases of how mobile devices can become part of this new ecosystem. It presents a set of applications that enhance the television ecosystem through mobile apps, using the possibilities of smartphones and tablets to increase capacities from a user’s point of view and that of the TV chains.

Audiovisual Design is a communication model, represented by a methodology of analysis and development of content that mixes audiovisual elements with interaction software and digital interfaces. This essay introduces the concept of media affordances in Audiovisual Design as a contribution to understanding and planning of actions taken by a person during production and enjoyment of sound and video using the contemporary set of media. The model represents the intersection between Human-Computer Interaction Studies and Media Studies, required to develop audiovisual and sound content today. The present text introduces definitions of Audiovisual Design and outlines the concept of affordances, characteristics of mediatic tools required for an individual to perform an assigned role, or step from one to another. This involves processes of learning and assimilating available affordances in different contexts. Audiovisual producers must be able to understand and predict how Audience, in different levels of engagement or inertia, will react in face of tools available through content and interfaces of distribution.

Designing a television (TV) application for older adults presents specific challenges, especially when the issue is an application that aims to support volunteer activities which will benefit older adults. This article describes the design process and evaluation of an interactive high visual-fidelity prototype of an application for a TV set-top box, which aims to allow older adults to request, in a simple and quick way, help from a group of volunteers, in specific tasks such as small household maintenance. Concerning the user interface design, a set of specific guidelines were considered and applied in the development of a high visual-fidelity prototype. The result of this process was later evaluated in heuristic evaluation sessions and user testing. The former were supported by a list of heuristics, drawn from other lists used in recent research and adapted to the context of the study. The latter were conducted with potential users that tried to accomplish some tasks on the prototype. In a context in which several studies show that television is a highly privileged platform to provide information to the older adults population due to its high degree of use in this group, this project may present important contributions to better understand some of the challenges that are associated with the design and early evaluation of TV applications whose target audience is older adults and some good practices that should be followed to achieve a product that is easy and enjoyable for this public to use.

One of the key components of the design and development process of a User Interface (UI) is the User Experience (UX) assessment. It guarantees that the product meets the users’ needs and provides the best interaction, while achieving usability goals and emotional reactions of motivation, arousal and dominance. In this scope, this paper describes the results driven from a User-Centered Design (UCD) methodology adopted in the development and evaluation of consecutive versions of semi-functional prototypes (of the UltraTV concept), with iterations that comprised an expert review and subsequent testing with users in a laboratory environment. This evaluation approach aims to achieve a proof of concept for the profile-based unification of traditional TV and Over-the-top contents offered in the same user interface. As an R&D project based on a partnership between the research field and the industry that aims to bring innovation to the interactive TV (iTV) domain, the UltraTV concept targets for the synergy between users and market interests. Despite the challenges of introducing an interface that unifies linear and nonlinear content in the same UI assuring the continuity of the UX contrary to the current app-based trend, the combined results from the experts’ review and the inLab tests demonstrate the relevance and desirability of the concept as a potential solution for the future of iTV. The presented results provide valuable insights for further stages of field trials with end users, as well as to prove the feasibility and user demand for the profile-based unification for the next TV generation.

With the continuous growth of channels and content available in a typical interactive TV service, viewers have become increasingly frustrated, struggling to select which programs to watch. Content recommendation systems have been pointed out as a possible tool to mitigate this problem, especially when applied to on-demand content. However, in linear content, its success has been limited, either due to the specificities of this type of content or due to the little integration with normal consumption behaviors. Despite that, recommendation algorithms have undergone a set of enhancements in order to improve their effectiveness, particularly when applied to the world of linear content. These improvements, focused on the use of the visualization context, paired with machine learning techniques, can represent a big advantage in the quality of the suggestions to be proposed to the viewer. The area of user experience (UX) evaluation, in interactive TV, has been also a subject of ongoing research, extending beyond the traditional usability evaluation, pursuing other dimensions of analysis such as identification, emotion, stimulation, and aesthetics, as well as distinct moments of evaluation. This paper presents the proposal for the development of a recommendation system, based on the viewing context, and a methodology for evaluating the way this system influences the UX of the viewers.

Given the popularity of television among older people, technologies based on this device represent a valuable alternative to promote info-inclusion of the senior population, enhancing well-being, autonomy and consequent improving their quality of life. However, to provide a better viewing experience, it is vital to use a personalized approach, which privileges the individual by dynamically learning users’ preferences and interests. In the scope of +TV4E project an Interactive TV (iTV) platform is being developed to provide these citizens with personalized information about public and social services from which they could benefit. This research aims to assess seniors’ preferences by identifying possible explicit and implicit feedbacks, such as up/down voting and amount of video viewed, retrieved from interactions performed within the iTV application. This paper describes the methodology used to define an adequate interaction scheme to learn seniors’ preferences based on these feedbacks, in a participatory and iterative design process, with 14 seniors. Such scheme will support the +TV4E content recommender system in selecting and matching the informative contents with the users’ interests more accurately.

The arrival of head mounted displays (HMDs) to the contemporary living room extends the need for producing content that works for the television and companion screen devices. In this work we introduce a set of three tools that can be used for the production and delivery of synchronous multi-device content, across the TV, companion screens and HMDs. The production tool is implemented as a custom Adobe Premiere Pro plugin. The publication and delivery process is implemented as an online service controlled through a web application. The content playout is implemented with a multi-device video player that combines video decoding and playout. In this article we introduce the design choices guiding our software development and the different tools we developed to realize it. We also detail some basic measures of system performance on different devices, and propose further steps towards the easy production and delivery of multi-device content.

The adoption rate of technologies by older adults is dependent on several factors, such as the identified potential benefits in the users’ perspective. In the scope of +TV4E project, which aims to deliver informative videos regarding public and social services to older people through an interactive television (iTV) platform, this study defines a process to design the video library allowing the access to the previous referred videos. Therefore, this article explores the process carried out to define the best design approach to present the video library. The research was conducted in three phases: (i) video library design; (ii) usability evaluation and (iii) definition of the final layout. Each phase included a specific sample of potential end users and different techniques of data collection were applied. The achieved results for this study revealed that working with older people is a difficult task and researchers need to be flexible, willing to adapt the data collection process to eventual needs that come up during a project’s development.

360º video can consume up to six times the bandwidth of a regular video by delivering the entire frames instead of just the current viewport, introducing an additional difficulty to the delivery of this kind of multimedia. Many authors address this challenge by narrowing the delivered viewport using knowledge of where the user is likely to look at. To address this, we propose an automatic view tracking system based in xAPI to collect the data required to create the knowledge required to decide the viewport that is going to be delivered. We present a use case of an interactive 360º video documentary around the migratory crisis in Greece. In this case, omnidirectional content is recorded using a 6-camera array, rendered in an equirectangular projection and played later by an HTML5 web application. Interactive hotspots are placed on specific coordinates of the space-time of the production, introducing a connection of the viewer with the story by playing additional multimedia content. The current view and other usage data are recorded and permit us to obtain metrics on the user behavior, like most watched areas, with the goal to obtain that required knowledge.

The computational innovations of recent years have enabled the emergence of a new technological paradigm that allows everyday objects to integrate new usages with the reception and transmission of information. These objects are now referred to as smart objects, because they augment the user interaction by connecting to the Internet and embedding electronic sensors. This new use of objects in daily life presents several conceptual, technological, economic and social challenges.

This paper presents and describes the SIX, an artifact with a tangible interface with the shape of a cube to select TV channels. One of the aims of the SIX is to abolish seniors’ difficulties when they interact with a TV remote control, namely selecting channels. In order to understand the expectations and needs of seniors while they are using the SIX, an empirical study was performed, which characterized the affordance of the SIX. The methodological approach for the evaluation was based on User Experience (UX) and Usability tests. This empirical study was intended to improve the SIX in terms of its handling (ergonomics), interaction and appearance (aesthetics), meeting the needs of its target audience. This paper will also report on the empirical study’s method and results’ analysis and discussion.

Audio description (AD) is an audiovisual translation technique targeted to visually impaired people enabling them the full access of visual content. This technique can be applied in several contexts, as is the case of Television, where a professional storyteller describes the visual scenes not perceptible by viewers with blindness and low vision, based on a pre-produced script made by a screenwriter. In this way, the production of AD is a costly and complex process, involving different professionals and procedures. Besides that, many countries, like Portugal, do not respect the minimum obligations mandated by the law related to the use of audio description in television programs. Despite this scenario, the current television eco-system provides possibilities to enhance this technique, leveraging the number of audio described TV content for people with visual impairment. In order to change this situation, we intend to develop a platform that supports AD production for television programs based on a voluntary model.

In this context, the paper aims to describe the platform, pointing out its functional requirements from a comparative study between the professional process of AD production and the voluntary approach to be developed.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the feasibility of offering a multilingual platform for text-to-sign translation, i.e., a solution where a machine translates digital contents in several spoken languages to several sign languages in scenarios such as Digital TV, Web and Cinema. This solution called OpenSigns, is an open platform that has several common components for generic functionalities, initially originated from the Suíte VLibras, including the creation and manipulation of 3D animation models, and interchangeable mechanisms specific for each sign language, such as a text-to-gloss machine translation engine, a sign dictionary for each sign language, among others. Our motivation is that the concentration of efforts and resources around a single solution could provide some state-of-the-art improvement, such as a standard solution for the industry and a greater functional flexibility for common components. In addition, we could also share techniques and heuristics between the translation mechanisms, reducing the effort to make a new sign language available on the platform, which may further enhance digital inclusion and accessibility, especially for poorest countries.