Mobile Cinema
Interactive Narration for Mobile Devices
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The Mobile Cinema research is performed jointly with Dominik Busch (Universiy of the Arts / v-->lab, Berlin). Mobile cinema, i.e. the user-specific and context-aware distribution of interactive content on mobile devices, has great economic and artistic potential, as well as many interesting aesthetic, social and technical challenges. Classical cinema content that is intended to be shown on a large screen in a dark room is often not appropriate for small screens. Moreover, lack of immersion is an important difference between traditional cinema and mobile media; as mobile users view content while still perceiving the world around them. The integration of video on mobile devices, therefore, has to be classified as augmented reality in contrast to the virtual reality experience of the cinema.
Mobile cinema offers new possibilities for enhancing social interactions in yet unknown dimensions, since viewers can interact with people and physical spaces while sharing their mobile media experience. The challenge, of course, is to perform the transition of conventional broadcast schemes in television and interactive television (iTV) scenarios to personalized mobile iTV. Location-based services and context-aware behavior offer many forms of interesting and new user interactions. One of the most powerful is to use spatial navigation as an interface to narrative structure and to combine spatial and media experiences.
Many of these themes were explored within an ISNM “Digital Film and Video Production” course at the ISNM in 2004, where several student teams created five film projects designed for context-aware handheld computers (Autophobia, Chill Pill, Confusion, Connections, Library's Memories):
During the course, the film teams integrated navigation features and story enhancements, based on the physical surroundings of the mobile viewer. To alleviate the complexities of context detection and context interpretation, we simultaneously developed a ubiquitous computing framework named ALADIN.
The film Autophobia was developed by Ranjan Shetty and Wendy Ann Mansilla was re-filmed with mobile phone cameras in 2007, has won the Nokia Mobile Film Award 2007 and was presented at the Nordische Filmtage in Luebeck, 2007.
The first set of mobile films has been produced within the course Digital Film and Video Development in summer 2004: Autophobia, Chill Pill, Confusion, Connections, Library's Memories
More information can be found at:
- v-->lab (Berlin)
- Andreas Schrader, Darren Carlson and Dominik Busch
Modular Framework Support for Context-aware Mobile Cinema
Springer Journal on Personal and Ubiquitous Computing.
Special Issue: Implications of the socio-physical contexts when interacting with mobile media.
Volume 12, Number 4 / April, 2008. Published online: February 22, 2007.