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David Chatting
Research and Venturing, BT
Martian Video Conferencing - waiting for a reply
Which communication technologies work when you have to wait for a reply? Could video conferencing ever be effective where the physical distance becomes so large that huge latencies are inevitable? For instance for interplanetary communications - Martian Video Conferencing! Where delays are in the order of tens of minutes or hours. Is email going to be the only suitable medium for this?
I would like to discuss a proposed threaded video system, to support the following scenario:
1. A short video message is recorded by Alice and sent to Bob, "Hi, how are you?"
2. Bob receives the message when he logs onto his home machine a few hours later, he watches Alice’s message and
as he does so his real-time reactions are recorded, as is his reply, "Great thanks - how was your trip to India?"
He then sends this message back to Alice.
3. Alice now receives a video first containing the audio of her original question and the video of Bob’s reaction
and subsequent reply.
There are further questions that this raises:
Is there only one shot at reacting and replying to the message? If there’s not and it is reviewable, does
this devalue the reply - is it less reliable? Alternatively does a reviewable system allow you to spend extra
time to craft the message and demonstrate the value of this relationship?
Does waiting for a reply actually add something? Occasion? Like a love letter?
If Bob interrupts Alice, before her message is complete - what happens to the rest of her message - does Bob get to see it? Could multiple paths of the conversation be maintained?
What is the acceptability of fragmented conversation that potentially last over a period of days or weeks? In natural conversations, short-term memory enables a referential narrative; attitude and mood changes are generally predictable.In such long-term interactions leaving a conversation becomes less meaningful, or rather that it may indicate the complete break down in the relationship.
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Demanding Suspense - waiting in an on-demand world
With entertainment becoming increasingly "on-demand", with DVD, podcasting, VoD and PVRs, when and why should we choose to wait?
When media can be reshaped to ever decreasing lengths, how can we create experiences that compel consumers to wait for a theme to play out or alter the narrative to suit the new demands? (I can discuss the BT Smart Media work which allows coherent narratives to be constructed against changing constraints)
To illustrate this further I would like to discuss our Affective Football Analysis algorithms. Using visual and audio features we can predict the 'exciting' moments in a match, which tend to be the goals, sendings-off etc. From this we can create a 'highlights' programme containing only the most interesting moments, but without the wait, anticipation and suspense, are the moments still as interesting? Would it 'better' to include a proportion of less interesting moments in the highlights? Do viewers habituate?
I am looking to investigate this with some experiments measuring a viewer’s physiological response (specifically Galvanic Skin Response) for the full match and the highlights. How does their level of excitement change? Are mood swings that waiting gives you needed?
