Media richness, interactivity and retargeting to mobile devices: a survey

Mobile devices, such as mobile phones, are becoming more ubiquitous and gaining more capabilities, leading to their increasing use as portable media players. However, the great majority of produced visual media is targeted towards devices with larger displays and greater hardware capabilities, making it difficult for these media to be presented on mobile devices. These difficulties will only increase as multimedia becomes more and more interactive, such as with increasingly popular mobile games. In this paper, we survey past methods for retargeting visual media to mobile devices, considering how such methods have been applied to text, still images and video content. We identify a shift from interactive retargeting techniques towards more automated methods as media richness increases. We discuss implications of this trend for the retargeting of 3D games and virtual worlds to mobile devices, particularly the need to focus on the retargeting of experience rather than solely visual content.