Controlled Interactivity - lean-back media experiences based on lean-forward technologies

Abstract

Interactive rendering technologies like maps, timelines, and plots can be powerful tools for data visualization and exploration. In the context of media, such tools are often referred to as lean-forward, implying that the user is actively telling his own story by using control primitives such as skip, pan, tilt, adjust, scroll, rewind, reorder, zoom, play and more. We are interested in using such lean-forward technologies in the context of broadcasted lean-back experiences, for instance as a secondary for a radio program or a TV show. Importantly, the idea is not to record these experiences as video, as this removes all flexibility and interactivity. Instead, the idea is to let media providers actively remote-control client-side, interactive technologies, as part of production. To this end, we present State Trajectory, a technical concept for shared control state, with built-in support of online sharing, dynamic state changes, and timeline-consistent playback.