Introduction

The workshop on Present and Future of Software Graphics Architectures for Interactive Television is organized in conjunction with the 4th European Interactive TV Conference (EUROITV 2006), in Athens (Greece), on May 25-26, 2006. This workshop aims to gather researchers (both from academia and industry) in the field of graphics and interaction focusing on the digital television use case.

Scope

DTV receivers are starting to show a decent maturity level and its market penetration is continually increasing (e.g., Italy, Finland, UK, and Korea). A number of Multimedia Home Platform (MHP) compliant receivers exist and regional standardization initiatives have joined their forces by creating the Globally Executable MHP (GEM) standard. Still, a number of questions regarding the graphics engine and the interactive capabilities of next-generation receivers arise from both the research community and the industry. Some of these research areas include: WWW convergence, 3D graphics support, and other standards integration (e.g., MHEG and MPEG-4). In addition, other output devices (e.g., HDTV and wall size screens) and television in other devices (e.g., handheld devices) are emerging issues. Finally, the open source community has been very active, producing quality software for digital television (e.g., DirectFB, LinuxTV, MythTV, KaxTV and Kaffeine, MHP4free, XletView, and OpenMHP). The target of this workshop is to gather relevant researchers in the area in order to understand and formalize the problem beneath. In addition, the workshop should describe the state of the art and develop an agenda for the future.

Topics

The papers submitted to the workshop should be related to latest developments in graphics and interactive capabilities of digital television receivers. Suitable topics include, but are not limited to:

• MPEG-4 in interactive television
• Java graphics application environment in interactive television
• WWW convergence (e.g., W3C initiatives)
• Other devices (e.g., Wall size screens, high definition TV, and handheld devices)
• 3D Television and 3D broadcast (e.g., virtual characters)
• Open source initiatives

Submission of Position Papers