Ambulant Project Status

providing a reference SMIL 3.0 implementation

In the past period, the Ambulant core focussed mainly on the implementation of SMIL 3.0. The new SMIL 3.0 State Facility allows the state of a presentation to be defined, manipulated at run-time, and then saved. The new SMIL 3.0 Timed Text component is a lightweight format that provides the `timed text' data type.

In addition to the development of these two new modules, the common Ambulant component was restructured, improving its portability. The `Windows Mobile' code base moved to a more recent version of Windows development tools.

The project team expects to include the initial support for the new SMIL 3.0 features around the announcement of the Last Call working draft of the SMIL 3.0 specification, in July 2007.

In the past months, several ways of increasing the impact of the development work were explored. Partnerships with the outside world were build. A quick overview:

• Within the SPICE project, Ambulant will be used as part of a media demonstrator;
• The Passepartout project was completed with a very positive final review, where Ambulant played a nice roll in the final demonstrators;
• Four papers on aspects of the Ambulant work were published;
• A workshop with Motorola on joined modelling of user interaction in a TV environment is planned. The workshop will be part of ISM in December 2007 in China;
• Collaboration with PUC-Rio on a new language which supports advanced interaction features has continued.

The near term focus for the project, is on the completion of the formal SMIL 3.0 specification, and the development of a full implementation of its features in Ambulant.