ICE-CREAM

Interactive Consumption of Entertainment in Consumer Responsive, Engaging & Active Media

Objectives
The ICE-CREAM project investigates how to make compelling experiences for end-users based on enabling technologies for interactive media, such as DVB-MHP, Internet and MPEG-4. The goals of the ICE-CREAM project are to extend the notion of interaction, to exploit domestic activities and familiar settings, and to make the user environment part of the visual experience.

The ICE-CREAM project develops applications in which live events (for example a soccer match) are enhanced on consumer demand with content that is created in real-time, broadcast streams are enhanced with content available from the Internet, and objects in the home are part of the presentation.
The application prototypes show different levels of interactivity for end-users. Business modelling frameworks are developed to specify the interchangeable roles of stakeholders (i.e., creator, producer, and consumer) to the service.
The ICE-CREAM platform consists of a MHP system that is extended with network services, MPEG-4 audio/video streaming and 3D graphics support.


Key issues
The key issues to be addressed by the project were:

• To investigate the relationships between consumer desires and needs, the appealing nature of interactive TV programmes and the development of a suitable and attractive business framework.
• To design and integrate the software architecture for the interaction between the user interface and the object and scene descriptions.
• To develop a number of iTV applications for demonstration and evaluation purposes
• To integrate a demonstrator platform to run the interactive applications, evaluate it with users and experiment with new business models.
• To provide a set of tools for the production of iTV applications

FOKUS Contribution  
Within ICE-CREAM, FhG FOKUS was responsible for the following main activities:

• Interactive travel application as showcase for the potentials of the integration of broadcast, broadband and mobile environments
• Production toolset which enables service providers to produce these kind of applications without programming effort

The project was partially sponsored by the European Commission (IST-2000-28298)