IAVAS

Within the project “Interactive Audiovisual Application Systems (IAVAS)” different object-based multimedia applications on the basis of the MPEG-4 object and scene concept will be developed. The focus lies on 2- and 3-dimensional scenes with both natural and synthetic aural and visual elements.

The work on IAVAS has been started at the Institute for Media Technology at the Ilmenau Technical University in 2001 and will be continued together with Fraunhofer IDMT. The object-based description of audiovisual content opens up a wide range for novel multimedia applications and services. Such an application contains media objects of different types (e.g. rectangular or shaped video, artificial environments, speech and faces) with a natural or synthetic origin. The local and temporal composition of media objects are defined by certain scene descriptions.
By using adapted encoders, media objects and scene descriptions are coded separately and transferred. On receiver site, several media objects will be decoded and displayed on terminal devices according to the scene description. The scene can be affected by interactions on every link of the chain. This method is part of the international multimedia standard MPEG-4 (ISO/IEC 14496).

The developed interactive and audiovisual application systems combine advanced usage options of multimedia applications (e.g. interactivity and scalability) with the possibility to distribute digital audiovisual applications on a definable quality standard. Another name for these applications is “interactive audiovisual media”. The most important features are:

• separate coded aural and visual objects are arranged in one scene
  
• objects with natural or synthetic origin
  
• scene is 2- or 3-dimensional
  
• appearance and chronological process can be affected by interactions
  
• all digital kinds of distribution are usable
  
• particular knowledge of terminal devices for descriptions is not
  necessary

The digital technology realizes the use of all kinds of information on all processing, transmission and reproduction systems. The traditional differentiation of distribution channels and devices widely will be obsolete. This process is called media convergence.

Already realized applications are beside the interactive visit of a trade show “iFair”, the interactive music show “Ilmenoke” and the object based interactive newscast “iNews”. For using these applications, an interactive rendering terminal “i3d” has been developed, as well as an interactive MPEG-4 Player for 2D and 3D scenarios with SNHC content (SNHC – Synthetic Natural Hybrid Coding).