Using MPEG-Based Technologies for Building Personalized Multimedia Interactive Environments with Context-Awareness Requirements: Development of an Application for Interactive Television

We are using MPEG-4 technology to build applications to be used in real environments. One of these applications allows for teacher to send real-time lessons to this/her students or to record them. The TeleLearning System under development includes: a) on the teacher side: a recording workstation with two cameras, microphone, specific MPEG-4 software; b) an IP network or an MPEG-2 TS satellite link; c) on the student side: a PC with special MPEG software, and a special board if receiving from satellite. This research focuses on the broadcast scenario where a satellite board is used in a PC. Thus, the work covers how to send the lesson even to a student that is not connected to the intranet, using a satellite link, either over IP embedded in the MPEG-2 TS or directly over MPEG-2 TS. For the security part it may be necessary to have a low-band return channel implemented, for example, through a mobile phone. The satellite environment may require the redesign of the User Interface and the retargeting of the elementary streams parameters in order to match specific requirements and features of the medium. At this point, new interaction criteria have been established from distribution of MPEG-4 media objects and MPEG-7 scene descriptions on network environments. Furthermore, context-awareness aspects are being added for providing personalization on the teaching-learning environment and MPEG-21 is being studied for applying to new multimedia requirements.