video experiences   

Over the past serveral years, I have been interested in creating novel experiences with video. These have ranged from the TuVista mobile sports video project that brought near-live multi-angle replays and player metadata to a variety of sports to the MyChannel project that created a personalized news broadcast on the living room television based on places that mattered in the viewer’s life.

mychannel
CONCEPT DEVELOPMENT (2013)

MyChannel was a customzed news program visible on the living room television that created a multimedia news program based on the places that mattered in a viewer’s life. We used Facebook to find the top three cities/regions where the viewer had the most friends, and then created a personalized broadcast using news summaries, weather updates, sports scores, and social updates from friends living in those areas. We utilized text-to-speech to create a compelling, lean-back news presentation on the living room TV and ran an 8-day field trial with a diverse set of users to understand how this concept could be used in daily life. We observed that the news and updates from places where peopel had lots of friends served as a conversation starter to discuss these stories with friends who lived at a distance. Publications: MyChannel: Exploring City-Based Multimedia News Presentations on the Living Room TV. Frank Bentley, Karolina Buchner, Jofish Kaye. In proceedings of TVx 2014.

tuvista

The spread of smartphones in 2008 opened the possbilities for mobile access to sports video content. Building on an existing project from Motorola Labs on Media Bundles, small sets of related content, we quickly developed a prototype mobile sports video system that allowed fans of a soccer match to watch replays of important plays along with player stats and bios for the people involved in the play. After testing this system in the real-world context of a soccer match in Mexico City, we created several design guidelines and built a commercial system called TuVista that was used at the Paralympic World Cup in 2009 and in the 2010-11 season for the Denver Broncos. These systems helped push the boundaries of rapid multi-angle video editing and delivery. The service is now a part of Nokia-Seimens Networks after the split of Motorola.

tuvusta phase 1
CONCEPT DEVELOPMENT (2008)

In the first phase of the TuVista project, we sought to quickly build a prototype that could be used during a live soccer match in Mexico city to deliver bundles of video and biographical content around major events in the game. This prototype served as a probe to deeply understand requirements for mobile sports video solutions as well as to understand the technical environment of modern sports stadiums. The system consisted of a Windows Mobile application that ran on Motorola Symbol rugged devices, a publishing workstation that was placed in the broadcast booth of the stadium and connected to the live camera feeds, and a web server in a back room of the stadium. The field trial consisted of 60 users during the duration of the game from several controlled access areas of the stadium. We logged participants’ interactions with the system as well as observed use from the aisles. While this system was quickly put together, we learned that future systems would need to solve the problem of rapid, multi-camera video editing in oder to publish bundles in under 30 seconds. We also saw several types of browsing styles including just wanting to watch videos (and not caring for the biographical content) and other users who just wanted to follow all content from specific players. We would address all of these issues in the commercial version of the service as explained below. Publications: TuVista: meeting the multimedia needs of mobile sports fans. Frank R. Bentley, Michael Groble. MM ’09 Proceedings of the 17th ACM international conference on Multimedia, 2009

tuvista
PRODUCT (2009-PRESENT)

The commercial version of TuVista solved the issues identified in the earlier pilot study. We created a new publishing interface for use in the stadium that could edit clips from up to five live camera angles, add appropriate metadata, attach player bios/stats/relevant ads, and deliver these bundles to mobile devices in under 30 seconds from the action happening on the field. We also added support for user generated content and multiple types of events/scoring. The system supported iPhone, Windows Mobile, J2ME, and Android clients. The system was first used at the Paralympics World Cup in Manchester, England in 2009. Two producers were able to capture every event from the games covering all events in Basketball, Track and Field, Swimming and Cycling, thus showing the diversity of the tool. Later deployments included the 2010-2011 Denver Broncos NFL season. Publications: TuVista: meeting the multimedia needs of mobile sports fans. Frank R. Bentley, Michael Groble. MM ’09 Proceedings of the 17th ACM international conference on Multimedia, 2009 Patents: Method and Apparatus for Creating Short Video Clips of Importent Events. Frank Bentley, Michael Groble. US Patent Application Number:20100107080.