L’actual diversitat de dispositius de consum amb accés a Internet fa possible una gran varietat de plataformes multimèdia per accedir a contingut audiovisual, serveis interactius, jocs i tot tipus d’aplicacions d’usuari. El concepte de televisió digital està evolucionant des de ser considerada una tecnologia unidireccional i relativament aïllada a formar part de l’ecosistema de serveis que l’usuari te disponible des de qualsevol entorn multimèdia, com la pròpia llar. En aquest context, la convergència entre televisió, Internet i aplicacions és una realitat gràcies a extensa família de dispositius intel·ligents que hi ha al mercat. Las Smart TVs, smartphones, tablets i consoles permeten als usuaris accedir a continguts de televisió i aplicacions interactives a través múltiples xarxes. El nombre I varietat de format d'aplicacions i entorns d'execució que actualment permeten accedir a algun tipus de televisió interactiva (iTV) dificulten la portabilitat de les aplicacions desenvolupades entre diferents entorns. La manca d'un estàndard unificat i acceptat a nivell mundial per al desplegament de continguts interactius en plataformes de televisió requereix de tècniques especials per adaptar els continguts d'una plataforma a una altra. Així, els productors de contingut interactiu poden estalviar temps i recursos en el desenvolupament dels mateixos continguts per a diferents plataformes. El principal objectiu d’aquesta dissertació és la proposta i validació de una metodologia apropiada per la generació i manteniment eficients d’aplicacions per a TV interactiva. Això permet una millor separació entre el proses de disseny d’una aplicació i les múltiples implementacions que es poden fer per plataformes diferents. Aquesta tesi analitza l’estat actual de la televisió interactiva i proposa una metodologia concreta per generar “write once, adapt to anywhere” (“escriu una vegada i adapta-ho a qualsevol plataforma”) basada en un format estàndard per a contingut portable anomenat DVB-PCF. La metodologia proposta és validada a través de l’aplicació de diferent casos d’ús que han servit per testejar les eines desenvolupades en el transcurs d’aquesta recerca. Això inclou els mòduls necessàries per traduir les descripcions multiplataforma (escrites en DVB-PCF) en aplicacions iTV per a plataformes especifiques (com MHP, HTML5, …) i un entorn de desenvolupament integrat que incorpora un editor visual d’interfícies d’usuari basat en el format seleccionat per descriure contingut portable. L’estudi de la sincronització del contingut multimèdia en plataformes web ha generat una aportació secundària relativa al desenvolupament de sistemes de subtitulació basats en HTML5. Aquesta proposta treu profit de SVG i SMIL per sincronitzar subtítols que son personalitzables per l’usuari i mostrar-los en qualsevol plataforma que s’hi connecti. Això també redueix considerablement el codi necessari per mantenir una línia de temps global. Els resultats de l’avaluació de l’experiència d’usuari per al sistema proposat de subtitulació mostren que les característiques de temps proporcionades per SMIL permeten una gestió eficient dels subtítols a través de múltiples plataformes HTML5 sense perdre la sincronització entre els components de la presentació. / The current diversity of internet-connected consumer devices enables an increasing variety of multimedia platforms for accessing audiovisual content, interactive services, games and all kind of user applications. The concept of digital TV is evolving from being an isolated unidirectional technology to become part of the ecosystem of services users consume in their multimedia home or nomadic environment. In this context, the convergence between interactive TV, Internet, and applications is a reality thanks to the family of smart devices that are available on the market. Smart TVs, smartphones, tablets, and game consoles allow users to access TV contents and interactive applications through multiple networks. The number of different application formats and runtime environments that currently enable interactive TV services hinders the portability of applications developed for those environments. The lack of a globally unified and accepted standard for the deployment of interactive contents on TV platforms requires the use of special techniques to adapt those contents from one platform to another. Interactive content producers can save both time and resources when developing the same content for different platforms. The main objective of this dissertation is the proposal and validation of a suitable methodology for the efficient generation and maintenance of cross-platform iTV applications, which allows the separation between the design process and its multiple implementations for different platforms. This thesis analyzes the current context of interactive TV and proposes a solution for generating “write once, adapt to anywhere” applications based on a portable content format for TV environments. The proposed methodology is validated through different application use cases that have been tested using the software framework developed in the course of this research. This includes the required modules for translating cross-platform descriptions into platform-specific iTV applications and an integrated development environment containing a visual editor for graphic user interfaces that stores the interface description in the portable content format. The study of multimedia content synchronization in web-based platforms generated a secondary contribution for the development of subtitling systems based on HTML5. This proposal takes advantage of SVG and SMIL for synchronizing customizable video subtitles across web platforms. It also enables to reduce considerably the code required by an application for managing time issues. The results of the user experience evaluation for the proposed subtitling system show that SMIL time features allow an efficient management of subtitles across different HTML5 platforms without losing the synchronization between the presentation components.

The increasing popularity and rapid development of the Internet and specifically the World-Wide Web in recent years has led to an exponential growth of users around the world in many different application areas. Following this growing trend, many eager educators have also embraced this new technology and have begun to use it as a tool in delivering education. A plethora of applications has already been developed in an attempt to implement educational content in this way. A general concern for many researchers is that most of these applications are not efficient in delivering educational outcomes and fail to achieve their educational goal. In the present project we propose that the present failure to deliver educational outcomes in an efficient way has its origins in the lack of concern and focus of developers on modern learning theory. Therefore, in this work we establish the foundations in terms of an interdisciplinary contribution from areas such as, educational learning theory, human-computer interaction and web design guidelines for the design and implementation of web pages aimed at facilitating the teaching and tutoring of basic statistics concepts. As a result of this work, a specific set of learning theories were researched and analyzed, the basic ideas of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) were explored and a set of appropriate principles from HCI were chosen. Furthermore, a selected group of Web design guidelines were researched, studied and selected to ensure that the final product contributes to the efficient delivery of subject content and effective achievement of learning outcomes. In addition, a number of parallels were formulated and discussed between the different areas of research. The establishment of a series of combined principles will not only contribute to the aims of the present project but also to further projects initiated by the Department of Econometrics at The University Sydney.

This study investigates and records the production of a digital media artwork blackBOX: Painting A Digital Picture of Documented Memory, generated through the media technologies of interactive multimedia, exploiting the creative potentials of digitally produced music, sound, image and text relationships in a disc based and online (Internet) environment. The artwork evolves from an imaginary electronic landscape that can be uniquely explored/ played in a non-sequential manner. The artwork/ ‘game’ is a search for the protagonist Nina’s hybrid cultural identity. This is mirrored in the exploration of random, fragmentary and non-linear experiences designed for the player engaged with the artwork. The subjective intervention of the player/ participant in the electronic artwork is metaphoric of the improvisational tendencies that have evolved in the Greek Blues (Rembetika), Jazz, and Hindustani musical and performative dance forms. The protagonist Nina’s discovery of these musical forms reveal her cultural/ spiritual origins. As a musical composer arranges notes, melodies and harmonies, and sections of instruments, so too, the multimedia producer designs a ensemble of audio-visual fragments to be navigated. Dance also becomes a driving metaphor, analogous to the players movement in and through these passages of image/ sound/ text and as a movement between theories and ideas explored in the content of the program. The central concern is to playfully reverse, obscure, distort the look of the dominating/colonialist gaze, in the production of an interactive ‘game’ and allow the girl to picture herself. One of my objectives is to explore the ways in which social research can be undertaken by the creation of an interactive program in the computer environment utilising interactive digital media technologies. The study reveals that, through the subjective intervention of the (player) user4 with the digital artefact, a unique experience and responsiveness is produced with the open ended text. The work is comprised of a website http://www.strangecities.net; an interactive CD-ROM; a gallery installation; digital photomedia images; and a written thesis documenting and theorising the production. 4 The term user, while widely debated has been in usage from the 1980s to refer to the unique human interaction with the digital artefact, electronic screen work, and computer interface.

Title page, table of contents and abstract only. The complete thesis in print form is available from the University of Adelaide Library. / Internet Protocol multicast has been standardised since the late 1980's, but is yet to be extensively deployed by most Internet Service Providers. Many organisations are not willing to bear the additional router CPU load and memory requirements that multicast entails, and the IP multicast suite of protocols requires deployment on every router spanned by the multicast group to operate. Additionally, these protocols are predominantly designed for the general case of multiple-source, multiple-receiver transmission and can be complex and inefficient to use in simpler scenarios. Single-source streaming of multimedia on the Internet is rapidly becoming a very popular application, and is predominantly being served by content providers using simultaneous unicast streams. A multicast transmission protocol designed for this application that can operate without requiring a widely deployed IP multicast infrastructure has the potential to save content-providers and network service providers significant amounts of bandwidth. This protocol should provide packet duplication and forwarding capabilities on routers in the network, rather than pushing this functionality to the receivers themselves, requiring them to become part of the multicast infrastructure. We describe Lorikeet, a new protocol for the multicast distribution of multimedia streams from a single source. This protocol builds its multicast tree from the source, discovering routers that support the protocol in the network and using them to provide branching in the tree. The tree itself is managed in a decentralised fashion, with joining receivers finding parent routers through a limited, recursive search of the tree. On a participating node, information about the tree's structure is limited to the addresses of that node's children and its path through the tree back to the source. Unlike most other multicast protocols, a new receiver is connected to the tree using its forward path from the source and packets are delivered through the tree via hop-by-hop delivery over unicast connections between nodes. Lorikeet also actively maintains the tree structure using a localised rearrangement algorithm triggered by a topological change in the tree structure. This rearrangement allows the tree to remain efficient in the face of changes to the receiver population, which can change the shape of the tree over time. Lorikeet is designed to operate with no further protocol support than that provided by existing Internet unicast protocols. It requires none of the standard IP multicast infrastructure, such as Class D group addressing. Its use of unicast connections between nodes allows it to be deployed incrementa.lly on the network, and its behaviour will degrade to simultaneous unicast when no routers that support the protocol are present at all. However, significant performance gains can be achieved even when there are only a few supporting routers present in the network: Lorikeet produces trees with half the cost of a unicast tree when just 10% of routers are Lorikeet-capable. Lorikeet's tree construction and rearrangement algorithms generate multicast trees of comparable total cost to those created by algorithms of considerably higher message complexity, such as those that employ exhaustive searches of the tree during joins. We develop the Lorikeet protocol from a set of requirements based on its target application and the properties of the current Internet. After describing the protocol's behaviour, we analyse its message complexity and its performance in terms of tree cost. We also analyse several other multicast protocols from the research literature, comparing their performance to that of Lorikeet in both complete deployment and incremental deployment scenarios. / http://proxy.library.adelaide.edu.au/login?url= http://library.adelaide.edu.au/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?BBID=1283785 / Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, 2007

While emerging technologies such as interactive multimedia are increasingly being employed in computerised music instruction, understanding of participant music listening behaviours in interactive multimedia music instruction is currently very limited. With the aim of elucidating music listening behaviour, the central concern of this work is to identify and explain participant interactions with the audio components of interactive multimedia music instruction. The investigation employs a novel documentation procedure, which extends the application of digital audio recording technology, to provide a finely calibrated analysis of the audio activity of a sample of 20 undergraduate music education majors during individual sessions with two commercially-available interactive multimedia music instruction programs. Graphically-based Sound Activity Profiles, which the researcher developed specifically for the current investigation, characterise and summarise participant interactions with audio components, while an analysis of questionnaire responses and follow-up interview transcripts provides supplementary information that further explains participants' music listening behaviours. The results of the investigation show that music listening behaviours during the study sessions were highly variable. While extensive participant interaction with music examples occasionally reflected attentive music listening behaviours, many study sessions were characterised by brief, fragmentary music excerpts and lengthy periods of silence. Participants spent as little as five percent of their session time listening to music and as much as 88 percent of the session time in silence. A substantial number of the study cohort frequently interrupted the music examples they had activated. Participants' perceptions of the extent of their interaction with music examples were frequently inaccurate, as subjects often substantially overestimated the amount of session time they had spent listening to music. The study findings suggest that many interactive multimedia music instruction participants would benefit from interventions that elicit more extensive and prolonged interaction with music examples. Accordingly, recommendations include a call for research to develop and test software designs that incorporate automated monitoring of session audio activity so that dynamic on-screen information about music listening behaviour can be provided to interactive multimedia music instruction participants. Such information may encourage participants to modify inappropriate music listening behaviours.

Thesis (M.F.A.)--Rochester Institute of Technology, 2007. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves

Zugl.: Magdeburg, Univ., Habil-Schr., 2004

Zugl.: Kassel, Univ., Diss., 2005

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2007. / The entire dissertation/thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file (which also appears in the research.pdf); a non-technical general description, or public abstract, appears in the public.pdf file. Title from title screen of research.pdf file (viewed on October 23, 2007) Includes bibliographical references.

Zugl.: Chemnitz, Techn. Univ., Diss., 2005