BBC experiments with mood for TV navigation

BBC Research & Development trabaja en el desarrollo de un interesante sistema de navegación que ayudaría al espectador a elegir contenidos según su estado de ánimo.

¿Es posible navegar entre una oferta de contenidos televisivos según el estado de ánimo del espectador en cada momento? Aunque parezca ciencia ficción, quizás no esté tan lejos en vista del proyecto Multimedia Classification project (Archives Research), que BBC Research & Development está llevando a cabo.

Usually, when we browse an EPG, we find content classified by genre in a very rigid and sealed manner with searches, on many occasions, restricted to metadata such as title or director.

Now the BBC is experimenting with a system that would go further and would be able to analyze content according to some characteristics of the video and audio such as brightness, laughter or action.

The system would value each content on a scale of values, thus being able to compare between programs. Thus, if a content scores high in movement but low in laughter, we would be dealing with a production of action, while, on the contrary, laughter predominates, it would be a space with predominance of humor.

The advantage here is that it is then possible to compare different programs based on mood results, allowing you to, for example, search for something more exciting content, for example. In addition, the combination of the scores of each scale gives the program a kind of fingerprint of the mood, so the system could recommend programs according to the criteria that the viewer marked at all times.

Interact with the user

The challenge now is to investigate how users can interact with this data depending on their mood. To this end, the BBC is currently in the process of developing a prototype of a universal control API interface represented in a 2-dimensional scatter graph, in which each axis would represent a mood scale.

This would allow users to see their mood towards programs in the form of points plotted on the graph. This interface will soon be integrated with BBC Redux (an internal BBC research tool) as a preliminary trial to see how people find this type of affective interface useful.

Another area of interest is how mood varies throughout a program. BBC has designed a prototype system using a universal control API that allows users to view a dynamic graph of mood data on a second screen (for example, a tablet PC or smartphone) synchronized with the broadcast.