Creating a User-steerable Media Presentation-system as a Canadian/Australian Distance-Learning Research Project

This paper describes an online architecture for creating a user-steerable interactive documentary from a database of edited media-sequences. Using a spreading activation net, meta-tagged content-sequences are recommended to users based on their previous selections, proving an automatically contextually-relevant path through video content. The system supports lean-forward interactivity with users constantly making choices, as well as lean-back behaviours in which the system automatically makes choices automatically. User-ratings, social networking features and user assembled micro-narratives are also supported. The system is currently running with professionally-produced content as an interactive documentary on the global diamond trade.