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Toward an understanding of context-awareness and collaborative narratives in mobile video creation

University of British Columbia

As computing technology and multimedia become increasingly intertwined, there is growing evidence of a shift in the way users engage with multimedia. Computing technology is facilitating a transformation- media consumers are becoming media producers. This democratization of creativity, which began with blogging, has now moved into the realm of visual multimedia. One of the major agents of this change is the programmable smart phone. Its portability allows for spontaneous, serendipitous and simple media capture in ways not previously possible. These mobile phones host a number of media capture devices along with their communications technologies, including still and video cameras. However, most of these are merely miniaturizations of traditional media capture devices, and thus prevent more sophisticated interactions. Leveraging the paradigms of context-aware computing, we can build systems that allow users to interact with media capture in entirely new and useful ways. We have designed a system called Scheherazade that facilitates context-aware capture of video via mobile phones. This system also allows for these video clips to be combined with clips provided by other users, creating collaborative video narratives. We conducted a user study using this system, to determine the usefulness of different types of context. In performing this analysis, we have discovered contextual information that is gathered through user interaction and contextual information gathered automatically are not equally useful when engaging with video captured on smart phones. We discuss design considerations for utilizing manual or automatic context and directions for future work in this area. The research presented here is an initial exploration into how context-awareness can enhance media capture and sharing on mobile devices.

Text

2011-02-18

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http://hdl.handle.net/2429/31543

Computer Science

University of British Columbia

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