Multimedia adaptation in ubiquitous environments: benefits of structured multimedia documents

This paper demonstrates the advantages of using structured multimedia documents for session management and media distribution in ubiquitous environments. We show how document manipulations can be used to perform powerful operations such as content to context adaptation and presentation continuity. When consuming media in ubiquitous environments, where the set of devices surrounding a user may change, dynamic media adaptation and session transfer become primary requirements. This paper presents a working system, based on a representative scenario, in which multimedia content is distributed and adapted to a movable user to best suit his/her contextual situation. The implemented scenario includes the following scenes: content selection using a personal mobile phone, content distribution to the most suitable device according to the user's context, and presentation continuity when the user moves to another location. This paper introduces the underlying document manipulations that turn the scenario into a working system.