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Autonomous vehicles are developing rapidly and will lead to a significant change in the driver's role: s/he will have to move from the role of actor to the role of supervisor. Indeed, s/he will soon be able to perform a secondary task but s/he must be able to take over control when a critical situation is not managed by the driving system. The role of new interfaces and interactions within the vehicle is important to take into account. This article describes the design of an application that provides the driver with information about the environment perceived by the vehicle. This application is displayed as split screen on a tablet by which a secondary task can be performed. The results of initial experiment showed that the participants correctly identified all the factors limiting the proper functioning of the driving system while performing a secondary task on the tablet.

Consumer live video communication has now become an established communication medium, but the current systems are still quite limited in their ability to support natural communication in more complex interaction setups. What new features might be required to further expand live video communication? This paper suggests: "orchestration" -- i.e. the ability to automatically and in real-time (re)configure the communication system to the needs of the interaction context. The inspiration for communication orchestration is television production through mixing views from different cameras and camera reframing. This paper reports a specific study of orchestration carried out in the social setting of a group of friends communicating from three separate living rooms through television screens and multiple cameras. The orchestrated experience was evaluated against a static (split screen) connection, and was carried out via a questionnaire, analysis of automatic logs and interviews. In this case study, orchestration has been identified as providing for more intimate conversations, whereas, the static solution emerged to be better for conveying group awareness.

Many tasks performed in multiscale visual spaces require the user to have several foci. Using bimanual interaction, multitouch devices can facilitate the simultaneous definition and exploration of several foci. However, multitouch is rarely used for multifocus navigation, and may limit the interaction to a sequential definition of areas of interest. We introduce two novel navigation techniques that combine multiple foci and bimanual touch, and therefore enable the isochronic definition of areas of interest, leading to simultaneous multifocus navigation. SpaceFold folds the visual space in the third dimension, allowing users to bring objects closer to each other. Our technique enables a direct, bimanual manipulation of a folded space and therefore provides high flexibility. PhysicLenses uses multiple magnification lenses to compare objects. Using a physics model, PhysicLenses introduces a general solution for the arrangement of multiple lenses within the viewport. We conducted a controlled experiment with 24 participants to compare the techniques with split screen. The results show that SpaceFold significantly outperformed all other techniques, whereas PhysicLenses was just as fast as split screen.

One of the challenges in designing an interactive cinematic experience is to offer interactive choices, which does not distract the user from immersion into the story. The interactive film Lost Cause focuses on the life of the main character explored through the perspectives of three characters. The correlated design of interface, interactions and narrative structure in Lost Cause uses different techniques to support an immersive yet engaging interactive story experience. One technique is to build an interface which encourages smooth viewer oscillation between the content of the story and interactivity of the interface. Another technique is challenged-based immersion created through viewer's navigation to discover the story. A user study was conducted to analyze how well interactions in Lost Cause affect viewer understanding and immersion into the story. The results from this study suggest the overall design is versatile and provides various degrees of viewer immersion.

In this paper, we describe our approach to the TRECVID 2007 BBC Rushes Summarization task. Our processing is composed of several steps. First the video is segmented into shots. Then, one-second video segments are clustered into similarity classes. The most important non-redundant shots are selected such that they maximize the coverage of those similarity classes. Then shots are dynamically accelerated according to their motion activity to maximize the content per time unit. Finally they are optimally grouped by sets of four to be presented using split-screen display. The summaries produced have been evaluated in the TRECVID campaign. We present a first attempt at automating the evaluation process.