Applying a multimedia storytelling website in foreign language learning

Storytelling is a practical and powerful teaching tool, especially for language learning. Teachers in language classrooms, however, may hesitate to incorporate storytelling into language instruction because of an already overloaded curriculum. English foreign language (EFL) teachers in Taiwan report additional problems such as having little prior experience with integrating storytelling into language teaching, locating appropriate stories, and lacking the cultural and language abilities to handle storytelling in English. On the other hand, researchers have demonstrated successful usages of computer and network-assisted English learning. The researchers in this study have developed a multimedia Storytelling Website to study how web-based technology can assist overcoming the obstacles mentioned above. The website contains an accounts administration module, multimedia story composing module, and story re-playing module. In order to demonstrate the effectiveness of this Website in significantly facilitating teacher’s storytelling and children’s story recall processes in EFL classrooms, it was implemented in one elementary school to test its effectiveness in instruction and in resultant student learning. The results of the study support the significance and the education value of the multimedia Storytelling Website on EFL teaching and learning. If such a Website can be applied within elementary EFL classrooms, the quality of teaching and learning can be improved and students’ enjoyment and success in EFL learning may increase.     

Dynamics of creativity and technological innovation

This article concerns the struggle between artistic expression and technological innovation. The perspective that is articulated is drawn from the work of the Interactive Cinema group at the MIT Media Laboratory. Situated at the boundary of evolving technologies and media storytelling, research of the group iterates between shaping and presenting cinematic expressions using emerging technologies and developing the required tools and platforms to support its creation and delivery. This dynamic is integral to collaborative expression on largescale projects, as well as in more individual research endeavours such as a current investigation, which conjoins new tangible display technologies with interactive stories.     

Making the connection: Lev Manovich's Texas and the challenges of interactive new media narrative

This article proposes the Poetics of Mosaic Narrative as a tool for telling dramatically compelling interactive new media stories. In doing so it validates the crucial elements of cinematic storytelling in the digital medium, which due to its fragmentary, variable and re-combinatory nature, affords the opportunity for audience interaction. In particular it focuses on the theory and practice of the prominent new media theorist, Lev Manovich, as a means of investigating and creating a practical poetics. The key element of the Poetics of Mosaic Narrative is the expansion of the previously forgotten and undeveloped Russian formalist concept of cinematurgy. This concept, as originally proposed but not elaborated by Kazansky, encompasses the notion of the creation of cinematic new media narrative as a mosaic—integrally driven by the narrative systems of plot, as well as the cinematic systems of visual style created by the techniques of cinema—montage, cinematography and mise-en-scene.     

Stereo Inverse Brightness Modulation for Guidance in Dynamic Panorama Videos in Virtual Reality

The peak of virtual reality offers new exciting possibilities for the creation of media content but also poses new challenges. Some areas of interest might be overlooked because the visual content fills up a large portion of viewers' visual field. Moreover, this content is available in 360° around the viewer, yielding locations completely out of sight, making, for example, recall or storytelling in cinematic Virtual Reality (VR) quite difficult. In this paper, we present an evaluation of Stereo Inverse Brightness Modulation for effective and subtle guidance of participants' attention while navigating dynamic virtual environments. The used technique exploits the binocular rivalry effect from human stereo vision and was previously shown to be effective in static environments. Moreover, we propose an extension of the method for successful guidance towards target locations outside the initial visual field. We conduct three perceptual studies, using 13 distinct panorama videos and two VR systems (a VR head mounted display and a fully immersive dome projection system), to investigate (1) general applicability to dynamic environments, (2) stimulus parameter and VR system influence, and (3) effectiveness of the proposed extension for out-of-sight targets. Our results prove the applicability of the method to dynamic environments while maintaining its unobtrusive appearance.     

Real-time Anticipation of Occlusions for Automated Camera Control in Toric Space

Efficient visibility computation is a prominent requirement when designing automated camera control techniques for dynamic 3D environments; computer games, interactive storytelling or 3D media applications all need to track 3D entities while ensuring their visibility and delivering a smooth cinematic experience. Addressing this problem requires to sample a large set of potential camera positions and estimate visibility for each of them, which in practice is intractable despite the efficiency of ray-casting techniques on recent platforms. In this work, we introduce a novel GPU-rendering technique to efficiently compute occlusions of tracked targets in Toric Space coordinates – a parametric space designed for cinematic camera control. We then rely on this occlusion evaluation to derive an anticipation map predicting occlusions for a continuous set of cameras over a user-defined time window. We finally design a camera motion strategy exploiting this anticipation map to minimize the occlusions of tracked entities over time. The key features of our approach are demonstrated through comparison with traditionally used ray-casting on benchmark scenes, and through an integration in multiple game-like 3D scenes with heavy, sparse and dense occluders.     

Learning object repurposing for various multimedia platforms

The major question addressed in this paper is finding a way to use existing Learning Objects in different forms of multimedia. There is evident need of using Learning Objects in various multimedia settings. With new shift in technology and the grasp of learning methods, multimedia is gaining on importance as a standard tool for education. Since Learning Objects consist of content and presentation, the presentation part creates a reusability issue with every new multimedia environment. Systems that are based on multimedia can reach high levels of presentational complexity. Integrating existing Learning Objects in to different presentational multimedia forms can prove very difficult. This is emphasized when it comes to games, since they are one of the most complex multimedia platforms. For that reason our proof of concept will use educational games as a subject, by honoring that if the concept is applicable in complex setting, it can be successfully applied in simple ones as well.     

Heritage presentation through interactive storytelling: a new multimedia database approach

This paper discusses the rationale for—and describes the methodology of—a new system of interactive storytelling being developed by the Ename Centre for Public Archaeology Heritage Presentation in Belgium. Based on 5 years' experience with multimedia heritage presentation systems, both on‐site and in museum contexts, this approach to the presentation of history and archaeology enables visitors to create their own ‘stories’ as they explore the information contained in a database. The collaborative virtual environment in this case is the visitor's exploration of a historical monument through a series of interactive panoramas and navigation options that allow the visitor to weave archaeological facts and historical information to larger narratives. Because the visitor can follow a number of different trajectories (of time, space and theme) through the monument, and can freely switch trajectories, hundreds of different narratives are possible. The creation of these interactive stories has a larger educational purpose. It has proved to be a uniquely flexible medium for the communication of personalized, interest‐oriented, and user‐driven heritage information for the general public. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Robust classifiers by mixed adaptation

The production of robust classifiers by combining supervised training with unsupervised training is discussed. A supervised training phase exploits statistically scene invariant labeled data to produce an initial classifier. This is followed by an unsupervised training phase that exploits clustering properties of unlabeled data. This two-phase process is termed mixed adaptation. A probabilistic model supporting this technique is presented along with examples illustrating mixed adaptation. These examples include the detection of unspecified dotted curves in dotted noise and the detection and classification of vehicles in cinematic sequences of infrared imagery     

A Multimedia Data Mining Framework: Mining Information from Traffic Video Sequences

The analysis and mining of traffic video sequences to discover important but previously unknown knowledge such as vehicle identification, traffic flow, queue detection, incident detection, and the spatio-temporal relations of the vehicles at intersections, provide an economic approach for daily traffic monitoring operations. To meet such demands, a multimedia data mining framework is proposed in this paper. The proposed multimedia data mining framework analyzes the traffic video sequences using background subtraction, image/video segmentation, vehicle tracking, and modeling with the multimedia augmented transition network (MATN) model and multimedia input strings, in the domain of traffic monitoring over traffic intersections. The spatio-temporal relationships of the vehicle objects in each frame are discovered and accurately captured and modeled. Such an additional level of sophistication enabled by the proposed multimedia data mining framework in terms of spatio-temporal tracking generates a capability for automation. This capability alone can significantly influence and enhance current data processing and implementation strategies for several problems vis-à-vis traffic operations. Three real-life traffic video sequences obtained from different sources and with different weather conditions are used to illustrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed multimedia data mining framework by demonstrating how the proposed framework can be applied to traffic applications to answer the spatio-temporal queries.     

True multimedia presentations: A case study

This paper describes work undertaken as part of a three-stranded project. The main deliverable will be a suite of software tools, classes and components, as well as teaching resources and methodologies to facilitate the production of intelligent multimedia tutoring systems.

The three strands of this project explore differing aspects of multimedia, and while they stand as separate pieces of work in their own right, they also form the building blocks of the final deliverable, which is an intelligent tutoring system. Intermediate outcomes include a multimedia shell and the Manley Group Demonstrator.

This paper focuses on the design and development of the “true multimedia” demonstrator that has now reached the stage of being a fairly mature prototype. It is used commercially by a communications company to illustrate the varying levels of sophistication which can be achieved in presentation systems and provides an exemplar demonstrating the varying degrees of functionality possible using current technology. The main requirement in the design and implementation has been usability both for end users and content developers.

Real-time control of the multimedia devices is achieved using sophisticated software which is tightly integrated with dedicated control hardware. The software can be used to produce canned presentations or highly interactive systems.

The system is installed in a dedicated presentation suite, thus allowing the true nature of multimedia to be demonstrated. It is scaleable in that it can be used to produce stand-alone portable solutions, highly interactive touch-screen controlled applications or complete multi-device high end presentations. This is achieved using the appropriate combination of software tools and hardware for a specific application.

Macromedia Director is used to produce visual and creative material for the system, while Macromedia Authorware can be used to provide interactivity. © 1997 Elsevier Science B.V.     

Definition of standards-based building blocks for multimedia content management

The emergence of new ways of rendering multimedia content from a multiplicity of devices like tablets, smartphones, consoles or smart TVs, opens a complete set of new opportunities for multimedia services providers. It is important that the development of those disruptive services is done in an interoperable way. Existing service-oriented middleware platforms and recently developed standards devoted to the definition and implementation of complex multimedia services may speed up its development. In this context, the identification of different content management scenarios including the high-level functionalities they require is an important aspect to be able to implement services in a flexible and interoperable way. Use of standards and standards-based architectures will be a key aspect to combine services offered by different providers. In this paper, we propose the definition of standards-based building blocks based on the high-level functionalities required by content management and distribution scenarios. This will facilitate provision of complex new services specially focused, but not limited to, the management and distribution of multimedia content.     

rStream: Resilient and Optimal Peer-to-Peer Streaming with Rateless Codes

Due to the lack of stability and reliability in peer-to-peer networks, multimedia streaming over peer-to-peer networks represents several fundamental engineering challenges. First, multimedia streaming sessions need to be resilient to volatile network dynamics and node departures that are characteristic in peer-to-peer networks. Second, they need to take full advantage of the existing bandwidth capacities by minimizing the delivery of redundant content and the need for content reconciliation among peers during streaming. Finally, streaming peers need to be optimally selected to construct high-quality streaming topologies so that end-to-end latencies are taken into consideration. The original contributions of this paper are twofold. First, we propose to use a recent coding technique, referred to as rateless codes, to code the multimedia bitstreams before they are transmitted over peer-to-peer links. The use of rateless codes eliminates the requirements of content reconciliation, as well as the risks of delivering redundant content over the network. Rateless codes also help the streaming sessions to adapt to volatile network dynamics. Second, we minimize end-to-end latencies in streaming sessions by optimizing toward a latency-related objective in a linear optimization problem, the solution to which can be efficiently derived in a decentralized and iterative fashion. The validity and effectiveness of our new contributions are demonstrated in extensive experiments in emulated realistic peer-to-peer environments with our rStream implementation.     

多媒体内容加密保护的方法研究

该文探讨了两种对多媒体文件进行加密的方法,全文件加密和格式加密方法,并比较了两种方法的优缺点;对加密多媒体文件的播放,作者通过对DirectShow技术体系结构的分析,提出了一种实现对加密多媒体文件播放的新方法。该方法通过编写新的源滤波器,对加密多媒体文件进行解密操作,使之成为系统可辨识的多媒体格式,并利用Win-dows系统自带的MediaPlayer进行播放。这种方法大大降低了软件开发的成本、时间和难度。     

An enhanced concept map approach to improving children’s storytelling ability

Storytelling is an imperative and innovative pathway to enhance learning due to the fact that such activity prompts learners to reflect to construct meaning based on their observations and knowledge. Therefore, to develop and enhance students’ storytelling ability has become an important issue for both educators and researchers. Since storytelling involves complex cognitive processes, this study proposed an enhanced concept map approach featured with story grammars to help children develop stories. By gathering the stories developed by 114 third-graders, this study aimed to investigate whether the concept map approach can enhance their storytelling ability. It is found that the children, who used the concept map with story grammars, can develop stories with more complex structure, clearer subjects, more creative ideas, and abundant contents than those only using the concept map without the grammars. Such findings support that the concept map and story grammars can be an effective approach for developing learner-centered storytelling tools which help students develop and apply the knowledge about storytelling.     

两种基于部分加密的图像和视频加密方案

某些多媒体加密并不要求加密后的信息完全不可理解，例如，在图像传输中可能只要求对其中某个人、物或区域部分加密；在视频点播中可能只要求将原始画面变得模糊，而其中的轮廓可见。正是基于以上两点，文章提出两种部分加密方案：基于分层编码的部分加密方案和基于目标的部分加密方案。并分别以小波变换的分层编码方法SPIHT和DCT变换的分块编码方法JPEG为例，分析了以上两种加密方案的效果和可能的应用前景。     

Resource scheduling approach for multimedia cloud content management

With the development of multimedia application and services, the multimedia technology has already permeated each aspect of our life. Multimedia cloud is used for processing multimedia services. However due to huge data volume, high concurrency, strict real-time, resource scheduling for content dissemination in multimedia cloud still remain challenges. In order to increase the user satisfaction and decrease completion time of content dissemination, the resource scheduling for content dissemination in multimedia cloud is proposed in this paper. The multimedia jobs are clustered according to user expectation and job complexity. The job with highest priority will be executed first. Moreover, considered multimedia task types and the impact of stragglers, the multimedia task scheduling based on task types and node workload is presented, which is a time-efficient scheduling approach. The experiments are conducted and the experiment results show that the job clustering algorithm-based user expectation and job complexity in multimedia cloud has better user satisfaction and shorter completion time, while the multimedia task scheduling based on task types and node workload can reduce completion time and achieve load-balancing.     

A portable UPnP-based high performance content sharing system for supporting multimedia devices

Since the development of traditional home multimedia is yet to be improved, the various multimedia devices are used for playing media content. Under the advancement of modern science and technology, there are various formats of compact discs to store and play multimedia content, such as VCD, DVD, portable disks, etc., and the latest, Blu-ray disc. However, it is difficult for these devices to share the content without any configuration. In order to solve the problem of playing effectively, we propose a portable UPnP-based high performance content sharing system for supporting multimedia devices, which includes a content sharing server, and media players. The content sharing server can realize the share services and file control of the portable disk, iPod, DVD, digital TV, and other devices, so that users no longer need to carry out complex processes to install software and settings, as the media players can allow users to play the multimedia file on any media device.