Smart Tools for Content Synthesis

Abstract

Before Gutenburg and others made printing relatively cheap and easy, stories were related through story-tellers and travelling minstrels. The stories thus told were probably never the same twice. The art of the telling would have been to involve, interact and respond to the audience. This art has, to a large degree, been lost. The most popular medium for story telling today is the television, and in television the story-teller does not know who is watching and has very little chance to involve or react to them. Television programmes such as Big Brother and Pop Idol both attempt to involve the audience and react to it through voting. These programmes have both proved very popular and are perhaps a testament to the audience's nascent desire to interact with a story line. As broadband connectivity grows, and as television and the Internet continue to converge, new forms of such interactive, involving and personalised television will emerge. This chapter describes some early results from a set of prototype tools and an associated software architecture that, by using object-based media techniques, allows television programming to be personalised.