Content-centric interactive video on the World Wide Web

The World Wide Web (WWW) as a mechanism to provide access to “real world” information in the form of live or recorded video and audio data is becoming more common. However, access to this information is limited to simple playback. In this paper, we present an architecture and a WWW implementation of Multiple Perspective Interactive Video, MPI Video, an infrastructure to access these new forms of information in more useful ways. Using an information system to merge the sensory and virtual data into a coherent, accessible, dynamic database, MPI Video provides content-centric interactivity. Multiple users can access this database to retrieve disparate information at the same time. Most interactions occur in a three-dimensional interface (a natural medium for interacting with real world data) which combines relevant real and virtual components. This approach is useful in several applications including teleconferencing, remote monitoring, and interactive entertainment. In this paper, we present the concepts of MPI Video and describe the latest implementation, a Web-based Remote Access, Monitoring, and Presence (RAMP) system.