The networked home as a user-centric multimedia system

This is a position paper that frames a networked home as a situated, user-centric multimedia system. The problem is important for two reasons - (a) the emergence of high speed networked connections alter media consumption and interaction practices and (b) ordinary consumers currently communicate everyday experiences through limited means (e.g. e-mail attachments). We need new mechanisms for networked creation and consumption of media, as well as new interaction paradigms that will allow us to utilize the full potential of the networked, multimedia environment. We envision an augmented user-context adaptive home that enables the user to rest, reflect, interact and communicate everyday experiences through multimedia. A key insight is that the practice of consumption, communication and interaction with media, across different devices and interaction modalities, affect the user context, and in turn is affected by it. The result is a highly personalized media practice for each user. We discuss three focal areas of our current research - (a) models for user context, (b) communication of meaning and (c) situated interaction. Modeling user context is challenging, and we present a novel multimodal context framework. In media communication, we examine research issues in media acquisition, media presentation and networked sharing. Situated multimedia frameworks are physically grounded systems, that require new analytical models, interaction paradigms, and additionally require new real-time concerns. Our framework is promising, and we believe will lead to rich collection of multimedia problems that incorporate networked interaction.