SYDNEY, Australia – For anyone who’s ever clicked the TV remote thinking there must be something better on another channel, it’s a dream come true.
Researchers have built a room where hundreds of programs appear on a large, wraparound screen. Use a remote control to point and click on a video, and the show immediately leaps to prominence.
What’s more, other programming of interest lines up, right within your line of sight.
The technology, T-Visionarium II, won’t be in your home theater anytime soon, but it may be the future of television, said Dennis Del Favero, co-director of the iCinema Center for Interactive Cinema Research at Australia’s University of New South Wales.
There are some issues to resolve. For one, the iCinema can be quite overwhelming.
You’re handed a pair of plastic, smoke-colored 3-D glasses and suddenly, hundreds of digital television images begin to swirl around you on a 360-degree movie screen that’s 11 feet high.
Twelve projectors display images on the screen; six showing images for your right eye, six for your left. Scores of flickering lights and sound clips compete for your attention, and you begin to feel like you’re trapped in an electronics superstore with all the TVs blaring.
With the push of a remote control, you can select which of up to 22,000 programs you want to watch. With each selection you make, a computer identifies other programs you might also enjoy and arranges them within your line of sight.
Standing in the center of the immersive cinema he helped design, Del Favero picks up the remote control and begins navigating the 3D library. One clip shows a scene from the popular U.S. television program “Desperate Housewives” in which actress Teri Hatcher pleads earnestly with an off-screen character.
Suddenly, dozens of videos appear to fly around the room and begin rearranging themselves around the clip.
It all seems a bit random, until a theme finally emerges – nearly all the images contain 30- to 40-year-old women in serious conversation.
The technology “allows you to reassemble television or any digital data according to your own particular preferences,” Del Favero said at a recent demonstration in Sydney.
“You select on the basis of what your interests are,” said Del Favero. “Your interest may be in gender, it may be in family situations, it may be narratives dealing with crime, it may be narratives dealing with love.”
Unlike today’s digital video recorders, which use word-based categories such as title and director to make recommendations, T-Visionarium II looks at the underlying structure of each image to pick other shows that might be of interest.
“What we’re trying to develop is image-based data mining, or search techniques, which could have revolutionary implications, because instead of relying on words to identify something, you have images,” he said.
T-Visionarium has potential beyond TV. It could be used to compare hundreds of hours of blurry surveillance footage with hundreds of hours of crime scene video to identify underlying similarities that could help police solve a crime.
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