Section: New Results
Multimedia Authoring
Amaya
Work on Amaya has focused this year on three main topics:
Formatting. CSS is the most popular language for defining the graphical aspect of web pages. Its syntax is very simple and it offers a number of properties for controlling every detail of document appearance. But despite this simplicity, its formatting model is very sophisticated. Web designers have learned how to take advantage of it to create complex graphical structures that allow documents to be automatically (re)formatted according to the available screen space. In that regard, key CSS features are absolute positionning and floating boxes. The formatting engine of Amaya was extended this year to support these features, taking into account the frequent changes that occur in an editor when the content and the structure of a document are manipulated simultaneously with its style.
Template editing. The implementation in Amaya of the feature that allows document designers to create and update XTiger templates (see section 6.4.1 ) was completed this year. Now, every element and attribute from the XTiger language can be created and modified in a template with Amaya. This is not only useful for editing XHTML documents according to a template, a feature that Amaya already supports, but also for creating the XTiger templates that will be necessary for entering XML data as explained in section 6.4.1 .
Protocols. The only way for Amaya to download and upload documents from/to a remote server was up to now through the HTTP protocol. But many web servers use SSL for secure communication and very few servers accept the HTTP PUT operation for publishing. To overcome these difficulties, support for SSL over HTTP was introduced in Amaya (URIs of type https:// can now be accessed) and a WebDAV option was added for publishing (WebDAV is now more popular for publishing on the web than HTTP Put).
All these new developments are included in version 11.3 of Amaya, released in December 2009.
LimSee3
In collaboration with partners of the Palette project (see section 8.2.1 ), a study was conducted about integrating multimedia contents in a reification process for sharing teaching practice. The issue is that sharing based on raw recordings of courses or meetings brings a very limited benefit, due to the very nature of video and audio. It is indeed too long to listen to a full recording when only some specific pieces are of interest for a given purpose. To solve this issue, textual annotations are associated to recordings and provide an easy way to navigate contents, thanks to synchronization between audio/video and annotations. With LimSee3, annotations are entered at recording time and/or afterwards, by several users. This makes it easy to prepare the recording of a course before discussing it with colleagues. This also allows participants to add more annotations during discussion, to record their agreements or dissents. This study was published in [8] .
Augmented Reality Audio (ARA) Editing
LibA2ML (see section 5.3 ) provides a strong basis for building editors for virtual interactive audio scenes (games for instance) or ARA scenes (guidance applications for instance). Our main interest is in the authoring of ARA scenes in the perspective of the Minalogic Autonomie project (2010-12) upon the indoor-ourdoor guidance of ill-seeing people. The concept of augmented reality audio (ARA) characterizes techniques where a real sound and voice environment is extended with virtual, geolocalized sound sources. An ARA scene is best experimented through the use of ARA bone conduction headsets.
ARA authoring is a non-static task (mobile mixing), for at least two reasons: (1) the author has to move in the rendering zone to apprehend the audio spatialization and the chronology of the audio events which depend upon the position of the listener, (2) the determination of trajectories which will be applied to the virtual sound sources is best done through a tracking system allowing the author to record his mouves and use them as trajectories.
For this non-static authoring task, we are considering an implementation of the see-through touch-screen interface concept to control the localization of the sound sources. The XML language used for the map on which these positions are recorded is OpenStreetMap (OSM) for outdoor authoring and an extension of OSM for indoor authoring.
The ARA scene will be described through the mixing of two XML languages, i.e. A2ML and OSM. This mixed format will allow a textual authoring of the sequencing of the sound sources and DSP acoustics parameters.
