Immersive mobile applications & interfaces
Commercial mobile services today demands a highly challenging application environment capable to attract and maintain end user’s attention in a friendly, intelligent and constructive manner. Towards this, mobile applications equipped with a virtually attractive and rich featured internet based interface driven by 3D/HD multimedia technology today can become a reality in the next mobile phone handset generation. 3D rendering and display is the key to enable richness of visual content over the digital medium although until today it was almost impossible to ‘squeeze’ and the large size of 3D content into mobile and even on the internet. New innovative revolutionary formats must be developed that will enable 3D/HD models enhanced with interactivity for the realization of the mobile immersive experience in very low footprints. On the other hand 3D rich Internet features could be also supported in mobile interface as a visually pleasing way to present products in web sites providing an outstanding rich user experience without sacrificing the economics and the quality of web applications.
Although today only 2D canned animations with limited interaction can be found, emerging applications and development environments allow the incorporation of highly featured rich content with real-time interaction with embedded multimedia information. Many important considerations should be taken into account when rich internet immersive content applications come into mobile mainly related with runtime performance and physical constraints. Today device and network constraints limit the building of flexible and interoperable mobile applications that take full advantage of the actual power a mobile device can provide. This turns to be a key challenge in the development of immersive mobile applications tolerable to bandwidth and traffic fluctuations, the limited battery data storage and processing, the heterogeneity of the servicing environment, etc. The ultimate goal here will be the development of a powerful and light-weight rich Internet mobile application capable to easily download and efficiently display 3D/HD multimedia content in a wide range of mobile devices.
Furthermore deploying 3D engines a typical mobile application can turn into a 3D pervasive one through the enrichment of HD/3D content with contextual information like personalization, positioning, etc. Interactive mobile applications for immersive media are also of major interest as they meet wide acceptance today especially in cases where virtual reality environments (e.g. games, virtual worlds) gets mobile. SkyMedia actually focuses on the development of immersive mobile applications that enable end users to interact directly with the live event content they experience (e.g. change of the viewing angle, live information about the event itself, etc).
