User Control and Dynamic Reorganization of Multimedia Presentations During Playout

We introduce a methodology to dynamically adjust the multimedia presentations as a result of user interactions during the playout. A constraint-driven approach is described for the automated assembly, organization and playout of presentations from multimedia databases. To allow interactive user control over the playout of an automatically generated presentation, an arbitrary number of control buttons are designated in the multimedia presentation system. Through these buttons, the user is able to change/aaect the ow of the presentation in certain ways. User interactions, provided during the presentation playout, can cause delays in the presentation schedule of multimedia segments or they may change playout constraints. To account for these delays and changes, we propose to (a) dynamically reorganize the subpresentations into a presentation, (b) replace segments with their compacted clips, and (c) delete segments on the presentation graph.