Virtual Channel Model

The virtual channel model is a conceptual framework for the design and development of interactive TV applications. The most complete guide to the Virtual Channel model, the implementation details and the user interface design is the PhD thesis Virtual Television Channels: Conceptual Model, User Interface Design and Affective Usability Evaluation (1,8MB PDF), by Konstantinos Chorianopoulos.

Introduction

The following papers cover various aspects of the Virtual Channel model:

The Virtual Channel model has been employed by HP labs (Rowson et al. 2005 (386KB PDF)) in a prototype.

User interface programming toolkit and Application Programming Interface: Chorianopoulos and Spinellis 2004

Applications (Personalized advertising and interactive music TV): Chorianopoulos et al. 2003

Virtual Channel model position paper: Chorianopoulos 2003

Rationalle and background information: Chorianopoulos and Spinnelis 2002)

You can also download the Virtual Channel poster (A4 page JPG 0,62MB, A3 page JPG 1MB, A0 page JPG 4,78MB)

Finally, there are short guidelines or an article (Usability evaluation for interactive television prototypes on a budget) for a low budget interactive TV experimental setup and a few screenshots of working applications.

Interactive Television Application Development

Find bellow examples of interactive television applications that have been developed with the Virtual Channel ActiveX control. Please note that the Virtual Channel ActiveX control is running only on Microsoft Windows XP Home and Professional.

MtvAd

The MtvAd is a very simple yet effective application of the Virtual Channel to music television programming. The user watches a pre-programmed flow of music video clips, with the novel convenience of being able to skip a video clip. Skipping a video clip might have been a nightmare for broadcasters --as it has been the case with advertising and TiVo . The MtvAd application employs a broadcaster defined video skipping penalty. For example, the user may have to watch one or two commercial spots before continuing with the next music video clip.

This approach has a few benefits: a) The application gets to know that the user is paying attention, which can be used to adapt the virtual channel dynamically, either with targeted advertising or with personalized video clip programming, b) the user may not like the current music video clip, which can be used to inform the underlying user-model that drives personalization, c) a new type of creative for advertising spots may need to be developed for this special case of advertising break, which can enhance the communication tools of the advertisers.

MtvAgent

The MtvAgent application has been motived mostly by the failure of the Microsoft Agent technology for the office-suite of applications. Is MSAgent also innapropriate for television user interfaces? Animated agents have been used succesfully for interactive television (for example, see Diederiks 2003). I believe that it is the only type of persistent on-screen user interface that is suitable for a great gamut of interactive television applications.Otherwise, user are reported to dislike whatever type of television icons during watching a program.

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