The Extended Living-Room
Tuesday 1 December - 10.45-12.15, Austria Center Vienna, Hall H on the Blue Level
Third and final session in the Pleasure Business stream at IST 98

First session Other sessions at this time Overview of programme

This session will not investigate whether the TV will become a PC, or a PC a TV.

Instead, it focuses on how the many functions of the household living-room can be enhanced by the use of information and communications technologies. "Living-room" in this context means the place where you spend time with family-members, friends and guests, chat, tell each other stories, play games, make or listen to music, entertain and teach the kids, and catch up on news from the neighbourhood and the world at large. The living-room can also be a community centre.

Presentations will cover enhancements to TV usage and programme production, new functions such as large-screen video-telephony and web-based systems for socialisation, and the use of intelligent agents. The discussion will help to formulate user requirements for standardisation bodies such as DAVIC (regarding scenarios for future TV), DVB (for in-home networks) and MPEG 4-7 (for user-friendly information handling and retrieval). The more technical details will be discussed in the following day's workshop on The Land of Middleware.

• Philip Laven, European Broadcasting Union (EBU) (CH) - TV anytime, TV anywhere
• Wieland Schulz-Keil, Europäisches Filmzentrum Babelsberg (D) - Virtual networks of real communities
• Robert Trappl, Professor and Director, Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence (ÖFAI) (A) - Agents for the living-room
• Uwe Haas, Institute for Film and Pictures in Science and Education (D) - Infotainment: learning in isolation?
• Diana Janssen, Radio Nederland Wereldomroep (NL) - TV's new sociology: Webbed TV
• Charles Swartz, Anderson Consulting (USA) - How will the development of entertainment content be changed by the extended living-room?

Contact: Leo Van Noorden, Leo.Van-Noorden@ec.europa.eu, fax +32-2-296-1786

Useful links

• The Land of Middleware workshop on Wednesday 2 December