The next stage of interactive TV with mobile: Number One Star Maniac from Japan

I heard about this really cool TV concept in Japan from our friend Lars Cosh-Ishii of Wireless Watch Japan a few weeks ago. I wanted to learn more about "Hoshi Ichi Maniac", or "Number One Star Maniac" which ran on Asahi TV, and found out that the concept was developed by Artificial Life here in Hong Kong. So this was a great opportunity to go meet up with their CTO, Ernest Axelbank who gave me a nice demo of the show and explained it more.

And before we go any further, lets be clear, this is the same Artificial Life which developed V Girl the virtual girlfriend we write about in the book and I've talked about over the years. They have been innovating in the mobile phone space, and mobile-TV convergence space for more than a decade and their games and services run in countries from Finland and Austria to the USA and all over here in Asia. So, lets get to this latest idea, from Japan..

So lets start with the basic premise. Imagine your typical TV quiz show, like say Who Wants to be a Millionaire. Nice standard TV format. A couple of people in the studio playing the quiz game. But we also know from Pop Idol/American Idol, that millions will be happy to join in TV shows for example through voting via SMS text messaging. So why not combine the two. How can we bring hundreds of thousands of TV viewers into a live TV show to participate.

That is where Number One Star Maniac comes in. In this show, there is a studio host - a real person - who asks questions, but the participants are the virtual faces of the mobile phone based participants. Each person needs to register to the TV show, via mobile phone, and select their avatar appearance and sign up with their nickname that will be displayed on TV with their avatar.

So the quizmaster asks a question. The three or four possible answers are displayed on the bottom of the TV screen, and each answer also has a corresponding colour, say blue, red and yellow. The participants at home use their phone to select one answer. After the answer is received, that person's avatar in the audience changes to the colour of that answer. Then after enough time has passed so everyone has had time to answer, a big nasty UFO flies into the audience, and scoops up all the faces in the wrong colours (ie who gave a wrong answer) and leaves only those who answered correctly, who then have their faces set to the neutral colour. So a million start, soon only half a million are left, then two hundred thousand, then one hundred thousand, and so forth, until there are only a handful contestants left for the final question.. As the game contestant numbers get reduced down, then as the camera pans through the seas of virtual faces, when its down to 100 or so, then each remaining participant can see their own face and name briefly on screen, and so forth. Even if I was eliminatd, perhaps my sister is still live and I see her avatar and face in the crowd, etc. All along, the game hosts will feature individuals from the crowd, make jokes briefly with them, with their face and nickname displayed on the TV screen etc.

This is the natural next step for game shows, to expand their participation. It is also the natural next step past voting once per episode, to kick off the participant in Big Brother or Pop Idol or Survivor Island. Now you can actually be in contest to win the game, not just be the jury to vote off the contestants. This is far deeper interaction.

Ernest showed me a bit of their technology. Artificial Life has created a technology they call MoPa TV for Mobile Participation TV, that merges three separate elements. One is the digital background, which is generated by computer. Into it they can insert any digital content, and in this case, the faces of anyone who is registered to play. You can imagine that if we fill a football stadium of 50,000 people or 100,000 people, then the faces become a blur. But if that level of participation is made in this game, then there is the need to "zoom in" and out of the group, to be able to pick individuals and highlight them, etc. The setting is in 3D design, like any virtual world environment.

As it is computer-generated, then imagination is the only limit to what can be on the TV show. The Number One Star Maniac show was set supposedly 200 years into the future, so they also went into some futuristic settings, like on a space station, where one part of the contest took place. As this is created in a computer, it is far cheaper than trying to create live sets in a big studio.

The second element is merging live TV content, so they can insert real people into the virtual environment. The show was hosted by popular Japanese comedians (I'm sorry I didn't catch their names) so that helps keep the show moving along and entertaining. These are done in the studio in front of a blue screen or green screen and then the system allows the virtual world background to be added.

The third part is the interactive element via mobile phones, so there are the quiz questions, but also the ability to chat and participate in other ways with the show.

This was of course Japan, so there were all the cool gimmicks you might expect. So for example the TV show would invite viewers to sign up for the next contest, or visit the website while the TV show was going on, and a 2D Barcode (QR code) was shown on the TV screen so viewers didn't have to type in web addresses on the phone, but just use the 2D Barcode to get to the mobile website.

There is also the ability to insert virtual advertisements, into the virtual world that is the background for the show. So imagine we are 200 years in the future. Wouldn't it be natural for Pepsi or Nike to advertise in that environment, so that they supposedly will still exist 200 years from now. I mean, this is product placement advertising inside the show, not the typical TV advertising that is shown when the TV show is interrupted for an ad break. Pretty clever stuff..

There even have been cases where they have merged the virtual audience participation with a live TV audience, as Artificial Life did with a TV quiz game on the Boxi channel in Finland recently.

But what kind of involvement? When they ran the first episode of Number One Star Maniac in Japan, within five minutes, they had 80,000 viewers signed up to participate in the quiz show, far more than the producers had ever expected..  All of those then voted until they gave a wrong answer and were eliminated from the show. You do the math, ha-ha, this is enormous..  Yeah, this kind of stuff is coming to a TV screen near you very soon..

Comments

[Lars]

Hey Tomi:

Great post.. happy to see that Annie got you in touch with Ernest too!

Thinking folks would like to see the promo image - link below - from the tv campaign here in Tokyo

http://wirelesswatch.jp/image_library/hoshi_ichi.jpg

Cheers!

[gc]

Hi,

Do they vote by SMS or through a midlet connected to Internet?

Do you remember how much time the registered viewers had to vote for each run? I'm wondering about the latency generated by the SMS or the Internet network, since typically you have about 30 seconds to answer.

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