Media in the Ubiquitous Era: Ambient, Social and Gaming Media

Preface

Consumer Experience, Customer Research, and User Profiling;
Learning, Training, Knowledge Sharing;
Novel User-Interfaces, Emerging Forms of Interaction, and Media Theories;
Communities, Mediated Social Interaction, and Digital Community Networking.

Andrea Botero et Al. (Exploring the Ecosystems and Principles of Community Innovation) discuss grassroots culture and the development of media to support and foster innovation within the scope of their chapter. They elaborate what communities drive to develop innovations and how tools can support this process with the help of practical examples. The focus is especially on community driven innovation processes and the implications on the innovation process as such.
Janne Paavilainen et Al. (Comparing Two Playability Heuristic Sets with Expert Review Method - A Case Study of Mobile Game Evaluation) focus on the evaluation of the user-interface design of digital games. Consumer experience is one crucial factor in the production of games. This chapter devotes in the development of a heuristics that help in user interface evaluation as well as in the playability of game designs.
Hiroshi Tamura et Al. (Lovely Place to Buy! – Enhancing Grocery Shopping Experiences with a Human-Centric Approach) present ubiquitous services as a huge business potential for grocery stores, however, also for increasing the shopper’s experience. This chapter devotes especially the issue of exploiting the possibilities of ubiquitous services while shopping. It presents clear guidelines and implications for the development of systems aiding the consumer through their shopping activities.
Stefan Uhlmann et Al. (Portable Personality and its Personalization Algorithms: An Overview and Directions) give insights in the increasing amounts of multimedia content requiring techniques to exchange, enrich, and gather information about consumers and their preferences. However, this chapter goes far beyond existing solutions for managing personal profiles. The described concept is based on a digital representation of a consumers’ personality and presents algorithms for advanced to associate personal profiles with multimedia services.

Christian Safran et Al. (The Integration of Aspects of Geo-Tagging and Microblogging in m-Learning) emphasize location based services, social media as e.g. Wikis, mobility, and learning as major parts in today’s world of media. The chapter focuses on the development of a mobile micro-blogging platform for educational purposes. The application shall foster learning via geo-tagging services.
Conor Linehan et Al. (Teaching Group Decision Making Skills to Emergency Managers via Digital Games) researches digital games, which can be played for fun, but also emerge in environments for training certain risk groups on specific disaster scenarios. This chapter focuses on the training of emergency managers in group decision skills in emergency situations as learning experience. The developed game emphasizes the learning experience in a simulated environment.
Sari Vainikainen et Al. (Exploring Semantic Tagging with Tilkut) see collaborative bookmarking and adding metadata to tags as common services in social media. By adding semantic meaning and ontologies to these kind of services, social bookmarking becomes to a powerful tool for knowledge sharing. Within the scope of this chapter consumer studies for enterprise use for a social bookmarking service are presented to gain insights in the requirements for social bookmarking services on enterprise level.
Ning Li et Al. (A Knowledge-Based Multimedia Adaptation Management Framework for Ubiquitous Services) discuss that the emergence of more and more multimedia services, devices, and delivery networks require smart mechanisms to adapt content to available resources. The suggested system provides a solution to perform this challenging tasks in a context aware environment to enable interoperability and smart media distribution.

Teresa Chambel et Al. (Interactive Visualization and Exploration of Video Spaces through Colors in Motion) discuss appropriate techniques for the visualization and exploration of digital spaces as one main problematic with the increasing amount of digital information. This chapter focuses on the description of an application that allows the exploration of videos with a novel designed user interface utilizing advanced visualization techniques for browsing and interacting with large scale video repositories.
Thomas Schieder et Al. (Issues on Acting in Digital Dramas) focus on creating a theory for the development of a plot for digital games based on theories in acting. Interactivity patters shall support consumers in the development of drama in newly emerging interactive environments such as e.g. iTV. The empathize is on the development of the ‘digital theatre’ based on commonly known theories coming from acting.
Alison Gazzard (Re-coding the Algorithm: Purposeful and Appropriated Play) presents a more media theoretical discussion is the content of this chapter. The chapter discusses various play types of videogames and how games can be explored outside of the intended rules of the actual games. It gives conclusions, theories, and research insights into reality games and their communities.

Andrea Botero et Al. (Exploring the Ecosystems and Principles of Community Innovation) discuss grassroots culture and the development of media to support and foster innovation within the scope of this chapter. What communities drive to develop innovations and how tools can support this process is discussed on the example of practical examples. The focus is especially on community driven innovation processes and the implications on the innovation process as such.
Sanna Malinen et Al. (Supporting Local Connections with Online Communities) research online communities, and how they support social interaction through regional networking is within the scope of this chapter. A survey underlines the importance of locality in the forming process of online communities, maintaining friendships, and the connection of activities performed locally and digitally. A main focus is on the identity of residents and attachment to their local environments and the role this attachment plays in online community forming.
Jiehan Zhou et Al. P2P SCCM: Service-oriented Community Coordinated Multimedia over P2P and Experience on Multimedia Annotation Service Development) see that collaborative consumption and tagging of media content became part of today’s world of digital media. Within the scope of this chapter, a technical solution based on P2P technology for annotating content is presented. The presented technical infrastructure allows the creation of multimedia intense web services via converging networks, platforms, and services.
Sal Humphreys (Unravelling Intellectual Property in a Specialist Social Networking Site) emphasizes co-creation and cooperation on online social networking site and the impact on intellectual property. IPRs are playing a more and more important rule when various people contribute to each others’ digital works. This chapter discusses the problems around these issues from a legal aspect viewpoint.