Creativity in Interactive TV: Personalize, Share, and Invent Interfaces

This chapter tries to induce changes in the way we think about interfaces and currently interact with television today. Either in the comfort of our home, in public shared spaces, or on the go via personal mobile devices, interaction should be intuitive, simple, and undemanding. This chapter is a quest for creativity and invention, it is about bringing new ideas into current interaction paradigms as well as shifting the way we see TV interfaces today. Technology has been available for quite a while now providing mechanisms that allow us to play, record, store, archive, and stream TV-related information, but the way we interface such complex systems and mechanisms is still bound to dozens of buttons on one or more remote controls. When groups of people need to interact simultaneously with today’s TV set, the interface barrier immediately appears with all its inherent frustrations: lack of control at the desired time and no immediate availability of the interface; single-viewer and single-task interfacing; and limited or burdensome options for viewing, archiving, and sharing. The ultimate goal of this chapter is to encourage creativity in TV interface design with focus on today’s available and affordable technologies such as video cameras and computer vision, computer graphics, and projection equipment all under the same principle: keep the interaction as simple and intuitive as possible and add just a bit of fun to it to make it really captivating.

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