Enabling Custom Enhancements in Digital Sports Broadcasts.pdf

1Enabling Custom Enhancements in Digital Sports Broadcasts Richter A. RafeySimon Gibbs Michael Hoch Hubert Le Van Gong Sidney Wang Sony U.S. Research Laboratories, Distributed Systems Lab 3300 Zanker Road, San Jose, California 95134 USA {rafey|simon|micha|lvg|swang}@ ABSTRACT Digital TV is an area where interaction is expected to become increasingly prevalent in the next few years. Graphics technolo- gies like VRML that are designed for distributing applications provide a presentation engine that can serve as a foundation for moving visual enhancements from the studio to the consumer platform. As these enhancements move downstream to viewers, they introduce capabilities for compelling interaction. We have developed a prototype that extends VRML to support interac- tive TV applications, specifically focusing on enhancements for sports broadcasts. Our extensions are built on Blendo [1], a presentation engine developed in Sony that derives from VRML. This paper describes the context for our extensions and the spe- cific extensions that we have developed so far. Keywords Applications, Digital TV, Graphics Systems, Interactive TV, Multimedia, Sports Broadcasting, Video, VRML. 1. INTRODUCTION Interactive TV is evolving as a compelling space for new media applications as platforms that enable interaction become avail- able in more households. Digital TV (DTV) enhances the poten- tial of interactive TV by providing a very high bandwidth data channel into homes that can be synchronized with A/V broad- casts. The Broadcast Virtual Worlds (BVW) project in Sony’s U.S. Research Laboratories is exploring the features of new ap- plications that can emerge to differentiate DTV from traditional analog broadcasting. Sports broadcasts represent a particularly interesting domain for interactive TV. Sports are inherently competitive and thus lend themselves to play-along scenarios. There is also a tremendous amount of associated data that can be challenging to present effectiv