Master of Science in Media Arts & Sciences, August 5, 1994. 1986.

A model of interaction is presented for a home based system generating evolving documentaries that can be tailored according to the viewer's interests in a given viewpoint or story. This model takes advantage of the strong points in the linear experience that television and movies have traditionally offered by letting the story flow while allowing the viewer's intervention to constrain it.

The journalist works in this personalized context by shaping the material for the video database using graphical annotation for video content and story structure.

The framework developed is used to revel a special angle on the Gulf War: information technologies tuned this event into a landmark in the history of not only media but also warfare. The amount of information available to the troops and the public reached levels never seen in previous conflicts.

By adjusting "content knobs" and selecting headlines the viewer sets the ways the story will be presented. You might favor the view of a particular journalist or of the view of the former Director of Information for the Pentagon on the selected issue. Maybe you had planned to spend two hours but changed your mind in the middle of the documentary, asking for a shortened version. All these adjustments increase control over content. The scenario I just described could be seen as a component of a "smart VCR."