New Approaches on iTV: Usability and Mobility Issues

Abstract

The wide adoption of small and powerful mobile computers, such as smart phones andtablets, has raised the opportunity to employ them in multi-user and multi-device iTV1 scenarios. Inparticular, the partnership between a personal device and a shared one provides two possible outputscreens. Then, one significant research issue is to balance the visual interface between two devices withadvanced output abilities. How do the devices compete or cooperate for the attention and the benefit ofthe user? Most notably, how is multi-device interaction iappreciated in multi-user scenarios? Inparticular, the standardization of HTML5 and the increase of cloud services have made the webbrowser a suitable tool for managing multimedia content and the user interface, in order to provideseamless session mobility among devices, such as smart phones, tablets and TV screens. In this chapterwe present an architecture and a prototype that lets people transfer instantaneously the video they arewatching between web devices. This architecture is based on two pillars: Websockets, a new HTML5feature, and Internet TV (Youtube, Yahoo Video, Vimeo, etc.). We demonstrate the flexibility of theproposed architecture in a prototype that employs the Youtube API and that facilitates seamless sessionmobility in a ubiquitous TV scenario. In our research, we are exploring multi-device user interfaceconfigurations in the context of a leisure environment and for entertainment applications.