VIFF's blog

The Mobile VIFF Film Voting System

Submitted by VIFF on May 25, 2007 - 4:19pm.
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A major project goal was to offer tools to allow festival attendees to contribute in a meaningful yet fun way, resulting in a more engaging and participatory festival experience; essentially, effecting "two-way" communications between the audience and the festival to the enrichment of both.


We developed several applications to meet this goal, one of which was to allow the audience to vote for and rate films using mobile devices and, more specifically, cast votes for the VI

The Mobile VIFF Interactive Voice Guide

Submitted by VIFF on May 25, 2007 - 4:13pm.
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A key application for the Mobile VIFF project was the Interactive Voice Guide which is a VXML-based, fully dynamic IVR (Interactive Voice Response) film and event guide.  Users can call a dedicated toll-free number and navigate the film guide and other festival information using voice commands and/or touch-tone control. 


Essentially, the system provides a voice-driven front-end to the VIFF’s on-line database of festival films and events that allows users to quickly retrieve a wide variety of information using a combination of pre-recorded prompts and descriptions, and text-to-speech.  It can be used from any phone, not just mobiles, although certain functions are clearly only applicable to mobile.


General system features:


• can be controlled using touch-tone and/or voice commands

• is dynamic in the sense that changes made to the back-end database are reflected immediately

• is available 24 hours a day and operates in an unattended mode

• allows the user to request that certain information be sent to them via text messages

• provides a simple, well-understood interface


It provides functions to:

• have the system send the user a text-message containing a link to the WAP guide

• access schedule by day

• access schedule by venue

• hear general film and program information (pre-recorded prompt file)

• vote for films (see my blog posting about the mobile voting system)

• retrieve general, pre-recorded and categorized festival information (rules, venue procedures and will-call, parking facilities, etc)

• hear schedule change information

• and other features


Simple and logical drill-down menus are provided to allow the user to navigate up and down hierarchies of information.  For example, if you select the option to hear “Festival Schedule By Day”, the system responds with:


“Schedule By Day.
Make your selection at any time by pressing a digit or SAYING the option number:
ONE for today's schedule, TWO for Tomorrow's schedule, THREE To select another day.

Technical Challenges in Content Delivery to Mobile Devices

Submitted by VIFF on May 25, 2007 - 3:54pm.
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As developers, in building our applications to meet the stated technical and functional project goals, we overcame a number of challenges.  Here, I'm speaking specifically about data-centric mobile applications and device-level user interface, and not really about voice applications - except in a specific area that I'll cover later.


The original conception of the Mobile VIFF project was very broad in scope, and we early on made several naive assumptions that led to our making a few decisions about functionality that were not realistic in terms of existing and available mobile technologies.  While theoretically we did not reach beyond the current state of technology, we discovered many issues with respect to the implementation at the carrier level (platform) of various technologies.  I do not mean to blame the carriers here, although I have to say that I do find myself a little perplexed as to why - in an age where open standards and interoperability form a technical holy-grail of sorts - we see so many fundamentally differing technical implementations and widely differing platform capabilities. 


To muse on that a little more, we developers see ourselves as being fundamentally important to the success of the carriers' offerings and yet it is still extremely difficult to "get on the deck" with a given carrier.  In my opinion, the carriers are doing themselves, their customers, and the developer community a disservice by not opening access to their decks and also not being more proactive about agreeing on standards and offerings.

Whistler Film Festival (WFF) Project Lessons

Submitted by VIFF on April 10, 2007 - 6:11am.
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Our experience with providing mobile content and services for the WFF reinforced the lessons we learned in producing the MobileVIFF project. The organizations that provide these services must take a leadership role in evangelizing mobile technology and content to the general public. This responsibility applies to the technology providers as well as the cultural organizations that receive the benefits. It was through the participation and assistance of Bell Canada on the WFF project that a potential answer to this  problem came to light.

Bell is a major sponsor of the WFF, and part of their participation involves setting up and staffing a tent in the main Whistler village square. The main purpose of this tent is to promote the Bell brand, specifically as it relates to their wireless products. David Vogt of MobileMuse, suggested that I contact Andrew Tsui from Bell to see if we could leverage their presence at the festival to promote the mobile project. On very short notice, Andrew was able to secure space in their tent for our promotional materials. More importantly, Andrew was able to provide an excellent URL (bell.ca/wff) as a shortcut to the mobile film guide. We were able to produce some custom rack cards that advertised this URL and Bell had staff on hand to help us promote it via portable display devices. Although the Bell staff in the tent did not have any specific knowledge of our project, they were very enthusiastic and energetic about handing out our promotional material. The Bell labeled rack cards were distributed much more effectively than any of our other venue materials, as a result.


Whistler Film Festival (WFF) Project Challenges

Submitted by VIFF on April 10, 2007 - 6:09am.
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Implementing the WFF Mobile project presented a number of challenges and roadblocks. Some of these issues were technical, some of them were organizational and some were social. As we had just completed the MobileVIFF project, we were able to anticipate and avoid some of the problems we had previously encountered. However, many of these issues are endemic to the current state of mobile technology. The following is an outline of the challenges we faced:

Technical issues - As we are still very much in the early stages of mobile technology, the rollout of a sophisticated and complex mobile application is a rough road. In fact, without the support of an organization such as MobileMuse and their platform, it would be practically impossible for an organization such as WFF to participate in mobile technology in any meaningful way. In the intervening time since the VIFF, the Muse platform had managed to rectify some of the issues we had previously encountered. Also, we switched to a different VoiceXML provider in hopes of avoiding the considerable problems we had encountered with our previous supplier. Despite these improvements, we still managed to encounter a few technical glitches. The largest, unfortunately, related again to the Voice Guide. Despite more promises from yet another VoiceXML company of standards compliance, there were continued problems stemming from the fact that our code (written to the standard) did not work fully on the provider's network. If one is contemplating a standards-compliant VoiceXML application, one should ask very detailed and specific questions about one's chosen supplier. Then, follow up with research and rigorous on-platform testing - if there is time, of course.


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