Towards immersive sports television
The PISTE project developed a system that turns TV watching into a personalised, immersive interactive experience. With the aid of a receiver prototype, augmented views are offered, allowing viewers to interact with visual objects to get information and change TV watching according to their needs. Moreover, a Head Mount Display device is brings the feeling of immersion and personal presence in the scene. Among the various project results an end-to-end chain is provided for broadcasting of visually enhanced, interactive content. Based on a central repository, it comprises an Oracle 8i/9i database schema and a data access layer with a set of software libraries. The database involves templates, interactive content objects, audio/video sources and sports/broadcast metadata. It is highly extendable and may easily adapt to other forms of interactive content production. Particularly, the metadata schema contains a well-structured and complete description for sports events such as stadiums, broadcasters, athletes and sports type data, as well as all possible interconnections of these categories. For instance, an athlete's demographic data, record history, injuries, accomplishments and lifestyle. These are registered to a given event (date, schedule, and records within previous events) held at a specific stadiums etc. Furthermore, a dedicated software tool was developed for the director or producer of a sporting event for completing visual enhancements on events. This tool allows viewing all available visual enhancements for this event, communicating with all involved operators about the favourite types of enhancement for each sport and controlling progress of work. The PISTE results may be used by broadcasters and media industries finding also useful applications in specialised content management systems and sports information databases.
