Objectives

The overall objective of TA2 is to enable new media experiences that are attractive and profitable, and through which people who know each other well can nurture and develop their relationships. TA2 will model five media experiences through the five concept demonstrators described in the project overview. These are enabled by improvements in a number of key developments in standards, technology, human and business understanding as represented in the figure below:

Interaction modelling language, to describe, model and author control systems that will orchestrate the capture and transmission of audio and video signals between groups involved in a dynamic interaction.
Multimedia composition and transmission standards required to meet the needs for incremental augmentation and enhancement of content while at the same time protecting the integrity of underlying media objects.
Scene analysis and interpretation of interacting groups of people, in order to identify, for the purpose of real time shot framing, and audio segmentation the region of interest within a interaction scenario and so help in the better audio visual representation of the interaction
Audio capturing, encoding, processing and transmission particularly in end-to-end multi-speaker, multi-microphone environments with a particular focus on delay, subjective quality, echo and spatial representation.
Model software architectures within which the technology components can efficiently operate.
Simplified narrative representation in order to automatically generate simple pre-authored narrative structures that generate narrative based media from amateur video footage.
Experience design, the ability to design enjoyable social experiences based on the new constraints and opportunities afforded by open audio visual communication including disciplines such as gameplay.

Overview of TA2 goals and enablers

TA2 will advance the state of the art in three distinct areas:

In providing new user experiences that help in the nurturing of social relationships.
In representation and modelling, in order to improve the new media experiences through the combination of better real-time communication and the use of stored media representation of the experience.
In multimedia processing in support of the objectives in the previous two bullet points.