Chris Greenhalgh, Steve Benford, Mike Craven
School of Computer Science and Information Technology
University of Nottingham
UK
Phone: (0115) 951 4221
Fax: (0115) 951 4254
cmg@cs.nott.ac.uk
Inhabited Television takes traditional broadcast television
and combines it with multiuser virtual reality, to give new possibilities
for interaction and participation in and around shows or channels. "Out
Of This World" was an experimental inhabited TV show, staged in Manchester,
in
September 1998, using the MASSIVE-2 system. During this
event we captured comprehensive records of network traffic, and additional
logs
of user activity (in particular movement and speaking).
In this paper we present the results of our analyses of network and user
activity in these
shows. We contrast our results with those obtained from
previous analyses of teleconferencing-style scenarios. We find that the
inhabited
television scenario results in much higher levels of
user activity, and significant bursts of coordinated activity. We show
how these characteristics must be taken into account when designing a system
and infrastructure for applications of this kind. In particular, it is
clear that
any notion of strict turn-taking (and associated assumptions
about resource sharing) is completely unfounded in this domain. We also
show that
the concept of "levels of participation" is a powerful
tool for understanding and managing the bandwidth-requirements of an inhabited
television
event.