Context Aware Mobile Video Streaming

1st Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Andreas Schrader (ISNM)

2nd Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Stefan Fischer

Mobile devices became omnipresent in our daily life, being always on and assisting us in communication with other people through voice, images and video media. Smart phones capabilities increased in recent years by using sensing (e.g. GPS, RFID, barcode reading) and communication (e.g. UMTS, GPRS, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth) technologies, video and audio capture, that facilitate user interaction with the environment. These capabilities combined with web services empowered people to become both consumers and producers of content that can be shared with other people. Various mobile applications take advantage of contextual information as location, time or user identity to provide better services to the users. This thesis investigates how context-aware information regarding social activities, available to mobile smart phones, can be used for browsing and producing relevant media items (videos) for nomad users? In order to answer this question a concept for a context aware mobile video streaming portal is proposed. The videos available on the platform, regarding socio-cultural activities (for instance in the city of Luebeck), represent user-generated content, produced and consumed on mobile devices. An Adobe Flash based concept of the platform will be proposed, using standard streaming tools (e.g. Adobe FlashLite) for implementation. The system concept will be developed for a state-of-the-art mobile phone device (e.g. Nokia N95) with UMTS access and GPS functionality on board. The combination of nomad devices with context-aware information can enhance the user experience in exploring a city as he acts in a smart environment where the virtual information is mapped on the physical location. Moreover users become viewers of content streamed live by other users of the platform. The thesis will explore in detail context definition, context sensing and technical building blocks for realizing a context-aware mobile streaming solution.