The developments in digital television technology provide the unprecedented opportunity to drastically extend the role of television as a content delivery channel. E-health, e-commerce, e-government, and e-learning are only a few examples of value-added services provided over digital televisions infrastructures. These changes in the television industry challenge companies to adjust their strategies in order to meet the opportunities and threats in this new environment. Interactive Digital Television: Techniques and Applications presents the developments in the domain of interactive digital television covering both technical and business aspects. This book focuses on analyzing concepts, research issues, and methodological approaches, presenting existing solutions such as systems and prototypes for researchers, academicians, scholars, professionals and practitioners.

Technology is meant to make life easier and to raise its quality. Our interaction with technology should be designed according to human needs instead of us being required to adapt to technology. Even so, technology may change quickly and people and their habits change slowly. With the aim of supporting user acceptance of iTV, the focus of this book is on the usability of iTV applications. A method for developing interaction design patterns especially for new technologies is presented for the first time. The main characteristics covered in this new approach are: systematic identification of recurrent design problems; usability as a quality criterion for design solutions; integration of designers into the pattern development process including identification of designers' needs, and iterative evaluation and optimisation of patterns to encourage designers to accept and use them; usability testing to identify proven design solutions and their trade-offs; presentation of specific design guidelines.

Though in the past online learning was considered of poorer professional quality than classroom learning, it has become a useful and, in some cases, vital tool for promoting the inclusivity of education. Some of its benefits include allowing greater accessibility to educational resources previously unattainable by those in rural areas, and in current times, it has proven to be a critical asset as universities shut down due to natural disasters and pandemics. Examining the current state of distance learning and determining online assessment tools and processes that can enhance the online learning experience are clearly crucial for the advancement of modern education. The Handbook of Research on Determining the Reliability of Online Assessment and Distance Learning is a collection of pioneering investigations on the methods and applications of digital technologies in the realm of education. It provides a clear and extensive analysis of issues regarding online learning while also offering frameworks to solve these addressed problems. Moreover, the book reviews and evaluates the present and intended future of distance learning, focusing on the societal and employer perspective versus the academic proposals. While highlighting topics including hybrid teaching, blended learning, and telelearning, this book is ideally designed for teachers, academicians, researchers, educational administrators, and students.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third Iberoamerican Conference on Applications and Usability of Interactive TV, jAUTI 2014, and the Third Workshop on Interactive Digital TV, WTVDI 2014, held as part of Webmedia 2014, João Pessoa, Brazil, in November 2014. The 10 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 26 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on IDTV overview; IDTV development tools; IDTV evaluation and testing; IDTV accessibility and usability.

Digital Broadcasting presents an introduction to how the classic notion of 'broadcasting' has evolved and is being reinterpreted in an age of digitization and convergence. The book argues that 'digital broadcasting' is not a contradiction in terms, but-on the contrary-both terms presuppose and need each other. Drawing upon an interdisciplinary and international field of research and theory, it looks at current developments in television and radio broadcasting on the level of regulation and policy, industries and economics, production and content, and audience and consumption practices.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Conference on E-learning and Games, Edutainment 2008, held in Nanjing, China, in June 2008. The 83 revised full papers presented together with the abstract of 5 keynote speeches were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 219 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on e-learning platforms and tools, e-learning system for education, application of e-learning systems, e-learning resource management, interaction in game and education, integration of game and education, game design and development, virtual characters, animation and navigation, graphics rendering and digital media, as well as geometric modeling in games and virtual reality.

Interactive multimedia is clearly a field of fundamental research, social, educational and economical importance, as it combines multiple disciplines for the development of multimedia systems that are capable to sense the environment and dynamically process, edit, adjust or generate new content. For this purpose, ideas, theories, methodologies and inventions are combined in order to form novel applications and systems. This book presents novel scientific research, proven methodologies and interdisciplinary case studies that exhibit advances under Interfaces and Interaction, Interactive Multimedia Learning, Teaching and Competence Diagnosis Systems, Interactive TV, Film and Multimedia Production and Video Processing. The chapters selected for this volume offer new perspectives in terms of strategies, tested practices and solutions that, beyond describing the state-of-the-art, may be utilised as a solid basis for the development of new interactive systems and applications.