Introduction

This section of the Marbella Film Festival aims to stimulate debate around the future of film making, production and distribution considering future plausible interfaces beyond the cinema and TV screen such as mobile phones and iTV and at the same time exploring the potential of new technological developments such as iTV, interactive cinema, interactive advertising, immersive interfaces and Virtual Reality.

It aims to provide a stimulant framework for young artists and media designers and producers to uncover future usage scenarios and generate debate about novel processes for creation, sharing, and consumption of digital content that match the nomadic lifestyles of the audiences of the 21 st Century.

Background

Becoming interactive, TV is replacing traditional ‘passive’ TV platform through the increase of active participation by the viewers, substantially influencing people’s experience with television and their TV-related social behaviour.

However, during recent years industry continuously failed to understand and forecast users’needs and expectations in sectors which are normally characterised by innovation-driven approaches such as iTV. Many companies developed programs and applications for iTV (or prototypes for interactive cinema) using inappropriately ICT resources that imply massive modifications in users’ habits and perceptive/cognitive overload. Consequently, the market’s response to investments in developing new products and applications for iTV and interactive cinema has not been positive to date.

On the other hand, users’ adoption of powerful handhelds with multimedia features together with an increasing interoperability between platforms (making communications pervasive) is resulting in expanding the iTV consumption beyond the domestic context (mobile iTV is already operating in Europe, USA, Canada and South Korea). However, we envisage that the future of mobile and pervasive iTV and that of pervasive multimedia systems in general cannot just be traditional content broadcast on handhelds in the format we know it now. It will be crucial instead to take advantage of all the potentiality of mobile phones not only as highly creative and interactive multimedia tools but also in terms of mobility, context awareness and sociability. Mobile phones are suitable interfaces for contextualized applications, that is, services which are correlated to the specific user experience. This feature might compensate the intrinsic limitations of this small device (screen size, data transmission and processing speed autonomy and memory) if compared to traditional multimedia interfaces such as TV and PC.

Moreover, recent technological advances in new areas such as Virtual Reality, interactive environments (spaces and installations mediated by information and communications technology) and other immersive environments open new possibilities for the development of new digital and interactive media and therefore deserve to be exploited further.

Themes

We welcome original media and multimedia works in the following areas:

* Experimental cinema
* Mobile TV advertising
* Mobile TV programs
* Mobile cinema
* Interactive cinema
* Interactive advertising
* Virtual reality and immersive environments
* Digital-physical hybrids
* Intelligent multimedia environments

Audience

This festival section is of interest to visual and digital artists, students, young practitioners and researchers working in the area of new media, cross-media and multimedia (from creation to distribution).

This includes managers of projects in the iTV, cinema, web and mobile industry (telecom companies, device manufacturers, broadcasters, service and content providers, etc.); new media ‘oracles’and new trends consultants; customer experience managers; professionals, academics, researchers and students in general with interests in the futures of human computer interaction.

Organisers’details

Dr. Anxo Cereijo Roibás is Senior Lecturerat the University of Brighton and Contract Professor at the Politecnico di Milano and at the University of Milan. He also collaborates with the Nokia Research Center in the Design of future Ubicomp scenarios, and works as a consultant for 3G services at Vodafone.

He has organised workshops in international conferences and in universities in Europe, India (NID), Canada (UQAM), Malaysia (Multimedia University & Motorola), Singapore(Temasek) and in different areas of HCI design for UbiComp. He is involved in research projects addressing the future of pervasive TV mobile phones, with support of the Vodafone Group Foundation, the British Royal Academic of Engineering and the BT IT Futures Research Centre. He is European Commission expert evaluator for Info Societies research projects and member of the Executive Committee of the British-HIC Group. He has participated in the Development Consortium at CHI2003.