Images of the Future

Individually, each of these companies might be wary of getting too far ahead of what consumers want. After all, right now, there are dozens of half-built attempts to create better metadata for multimedia -- none of which has yet taken the world by storm. But knowing that a well-built system can work everywhere, industry veterans say that a unifying standard will make it much easier to march forward.

"With good metadata, you can create new applications," says Peter van Beek, a project leader for Sharp's U.S. research lab in Camas, Washington. "And it's going to make the existing applications more valuable."

One of the ideas that Sharp Labs is playing with involves developing user profiles that are fully portable. Watch movies at home, and software can keep track of your favorite actors and genres. Board a plane or check into a hotel, and that same software can point you toward a menu of choices that you might like.

Another Sharp Labs project involves automating the otherwise slow and laborious process of identifying particular segments of video content. Lately, van Beek and his researchers have been cooking up ways to identify home runs or soccer goals automatically in sports videos. There are enough common elements of a home run, he says -- the crack of the bat, the camera zooming into the bleachers, the slugger circling the bases -- that his team's accuracy rates approach 99%. That kind of ability makes it easy to label or repackage game footage so that fans can zoom ahead to the highlights if they wish.

In fact, almost everyone associated with the MPEG-7 project has already advanced some favorite ideas about how to harness this powerful new technology. Talal Shamoon, head of business development for InterTrust Technologies Corp., a digital-rights-management company in Santa Clara, California, sees a day when news organizations can search through old footage for relevant clips as never before. "Say you wanted something from the archives on Afghanistan," he says. "Now you would be able to get information quickly and efficiently, without having to scroll through endless old tapes."

Add up all of these initiatives, Chiariglione says, and "there will be new companies, and maybe even new industries, formed around metadata." The hardest work will be performed in the first few years, he says, which will be spent translating today's standards into fully functioning metadata services. But he believes that once consumers begin interacting with these new systems, the momentum to do more will become unstoppable. As Chiariglione wryly puts it, "Producers who care to have their programs watched will have to describe their content as fully and as engagingly as possible."

George Anders (ganders@fastcompany.com) is Fast Company's Silicon Valley bureau chief. Find a catalog of his columns here. Learn more about Leonardo Chiariglione and Telecom Italia Lab on the Web (http://leonardo.tilab.com).