New Scientist takes note of our prototype for User Generated Content

Our colleagues at CWI, who were part of the development team on our prototype system for automatic compilation of videos from user-generated content, chatted recently with New Scientist magazine to tell them a little more about it. Here's the article - http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21528835.800-video-mashups-give-you-personalised-memories.html

The narrative engine developed by the Narrative and Interactive Media (NIM) group at Goldsmiths works with the help of an authored symbolic representation of the story surrounding a social event. In the case of our prototype this was a school concert. Users, via a web-based app, were able to interact with a personalised movie created from all the video footage shot and uploaded by all the friends and family who witnessed and captured media at the concert.

I am about to present a paper - 'Interactive Video Stories from User Generated Content: a School Concert Use Case' -  about building the algorithm for the system at the upcoming International Conference on Digital Storytelling (ICIDS) in San Sebastian, Nov 12-15. In the paper I go into more details about how the notion of a 'sequence' was borrowed from existing TV editing practice and used to create a flexible computer based story model based on a previous NIM development, Narrative Structure Language (NSL). The last link takes you through to a publication in the ACM Multimedia Systems Journal about NSL.

HTML5 shows what it can do with the help of Microsoft

HTML5 has often promised to offer the promised land  where web apps will replace all those downloads we all make to our devices. However, it always seems to be coming in the future with the odd exciting demo on a web site somewhere to whet our appetites.

In our own work in interactive narrative at the Narrative and Interactive Media group at Goldmiths we have started experimenting with HTML5/JavaScript to help assemble our complex interactive video stories in a way that was hard to achieve with previous web implementations, and it is proving to be powerful.

And, interestingly, it seems that Microsoft are beginning to agree that there's a future in it, enough to push it within their own ecosystem.

This video shows a Microsoft sponsored version of Contre Jour running in the browser. The interesting thing to see is how the aspects of the touch interface are all there, present and correct and functioning smoothly.

Ok. I agree it's a shame that it only runs properly in the soon to be released IE10 however, I think fair play to Microsoft for developing interactive media that works so well through the browser. You could be forgiven for thinking that this a locally downloaded application.

It used to be a common thread of thinking that the downloading app economy would soon be sacrificed to the onslaught of web apps. Well, with Microsoft on,board who knows, it might just happen. I for one am looking forward to the release of the Surface.