User-controlled, multimedia-enhanced communication using prior knowledge and experience

This article focuses on enriching the communication experience between human beings interacting through different kinds of devices, including mobile phones and PDAs. The key point is how to effectively exploit multimedia data to enhance the richness of communication without overloading the communication channel. To this end, the system tries to minimize the quantity of information transmitted over the networks and to maximize the usage of locally stored information. The proposed system sends several kinds of data, including continuous video, video clips, still images, and avatars, over the communication channel. The specific data that are sent are based on the parameters set by the transmitting and receiving terminals. Bandwidth-consuming data, such as continuous video, are transmitted only occasionally at the receiving terminal. The system has been partially implemented and incorporated in avatar-enabled cellular phones. The user may then easily create different avatars combining components characterizing faces, hair, and so on, and associate them with different callers. When a call comes through, the avatar corresponding to the caller is retrieved and displayed on the screen and the corresponding information is retrieved from the personal database.