Exploring technology and design for interactive TV on tvOS : A game show as an example

Abstract: This project explores the ability to use “smart” media devices for the TV set as platforms for interactive TV shows. The research approach was research-based design where a prototype was designed, developed, and evaluated with user tests. The project used a Swedish television game show called “På spåret” and an application for tvOS on Apple TV was developed, which allow users to play along with the show. The software implements a model-view-controller architecture and uses the AVFoundation framework for playing video streams together with the UIKit framework to create interactive overlay views. The interactive elements were synchronized with the video by the usage of metadata. The user test results show that the interactive TV show gained in both entertainment and excitement among the users. Further conclusions are that interactive elements can be available both during playing or paused video and the context should decide which mode. A multimodal interface with gestures and sound as feedback seems to be a good option, based on user tests. This project also presents a solution for user input with the remote, using a virtual keyboard together with filter function. The user filtering out the input from a data set to minimize the typing of letters. User tests show that the filter solution seems to be a good option for text input in a specific domain or category of allowed input. However, for free text input, a better method is required.