Future Media Internet for large-scale CONTent experimentation
Driving innovation at the crossroads of content, media, networks & creativity
Major European and global companies and research centres have joined their skills in the FIcontent initiative to drive innovation at the crossroads of content, media, networks and creativity. This initiative aims at developing and experimenting across Europe cutting edge ICT platforms devoted to applications and services in the areas of social connected TV, smart city services, and pervasive games. Any European stakeholders, particularly developers and SMEs, willing to innovate and boost their business can access and use these open platforms. Whilst doing so they will receive support from the FIcontent companies and research centres. Open calls will offer funding to selected stakeholders. FIcontent is part of the Future Internet Public Private Partnership (FI-PPP) flagship programme supported by the European Commission: a total investment of 600 Mio Euro over 5 years to build Europe's Future Internet.
Our core activity is to deliver a common technical platform that application providers can use to build, host and operate content applications for their end users. It offers interested developers and SMEs runtime containers and a catalogue of homogeneous APIs to use: Server-side enablers, Services developed for Social connected TV, Smart city services and Pervasive game platform applications, which can be combined to deliver new cross-domain applications
Tools and services to simplify the process of building, deploying, monitoring and managing content-related applications on top of Cloud infrastructures and Content Delivery Networks so that the appropriate Quality of Service is met.
Cutting-edge ICT platforms to develop innovative applications & services
Social connected TV
- Multi-screen interaction
- Personalised TV experience
- User tracking and privacy
The Social connected TV platform is designed to foster the development and uptake of TV applications based on Future Internet technologies: an entirely new ecosystem is evolving around connected TVs, enabling new applications and concepts around TV content. The platform will build on this trend, demonstrating a number of exciting innovations and new user experiences based on open standards such as HbbTV and HTML5. Our solutions will help to overcome market fragmentation and give third-party application providers access to our platform. To achieve sustainable impact, we will actively embrace stakeholders and implement a number of trials with professional content that integrate technologies, services and additional content to create new user experiences.
Smart city services
- Live information
- Live sharing & communication
The Smart city services platform enables creative people to generate, share and combine assets, objects and stories to develop mobility city services and new experiences. Contextualisation, recommendation, 3D, mixed reality, live information, sharing capacities and communications technologies will be offered. It is a social platform where people can login, connect and build communities to interact with each other and gain from social streams there. Artists and developers can use these tools and combine their own or shared assets of other community members with geo-localized data provided by the framework to create interactive art and new types of media stories and experiences. It also implements an Application Programming Interface (API) that can be used to extend the scope of the platform even further. This way it enables companies to engage in existing services and create new ones to stretch their business model into a new universe of media experiences.
- Augmented reality
- Blending real and virtual worlds
- Toys, installations, and city-wide games
The Pervasive games platform demonstrates a strong mix of real life and Internet experience in a playful way and shows advances in 3D or virtual world environments in a way that becomes immersive and “real". The platform focuses on multiplayer mobile gaming that leverages the future Internet technology in order to enable large groups of users to participate in innovative mobile gameplay experiences.
We organize our scenarios into a 3-tiered structure, which provides a scalable product framework of layered building blocks necessary to implement compelling authentic gaming experiences aligned to business uses:
- Consumer Products: augmented-reality games based on toys, fashion, and other connected, digitally enhanced physical products.
- Location-Based Installations: games developed in an installation such as a historic monument in which connected, cooperative game experiences are used to make the visit more compelling.
- City-wide Games: games in which larger numbers of players interact in unstructured environments
Two successive sets of real-world experimentation of the platform for each of the three targeted application areas (Social connected TV, Smart city services and Pervasive games) will be conducted in 6 European locations: Brittany (France), Berlin, Cologne, Barcelona, Zurich and Lancaster, with the support of local public authorities. The size of each test will range from 20 to 1000 users (user panels, households).
The Fraunhofer FOKUS' Competence Center Future Applications and Media is involved in "Social connected TV" and "Smart city services". We are focusing on the development and integration of cutting-edge technologies for interactive, multi-screen applications and services in social connected TV environments through e.g. our Content Enrichment enabler. The Smart City Guide activities are aligned with the overall scope of Fraunhofer FOKUS as the major Smart City Institute within the Fraunhofer Society. Our research work is dedicated to services and technologies that help citizens and visitors of smart cities as well as industries active in this sector. Therefore we develop enablers like the Open City Database, a Recommendation as a Service component. The evaluation of those technologies are conducted through large scale user experimentations and trials at the Berlin experimentation site. The site is managed and operated by Fraunhofer FOKUS with support from RBB and IRT.
Major European & global companies and research centers have joined their skills: