Supporting audience and player interaction during interactive media performances

Recent advances in Web-based multimedia technologies encourage the staging of interactive media performances that allow multiple users to view or participate in an event in real time. This research provides a novel, distributed interaction framework that supports audience and player interaction during interactive media performances. More specifically, this framework allows multiple users to participate in the performance either as players or spectators and exchange messages that describe player actions or audience reactions, respectively. In addition, the framework monitors the development of the performance and the behavior of the participants and executes a set of multimedia effects that seek to maintain a high degree of audience involvement in the event. Finally, the framework synchronizes the appearance of audience reactions with performance developments at each site based on the number and rate of player actions. This method has been applied and tested in MISSION, a multi-player game on the Web.