Chapter 5: Realizing a Metadata Framework 137 THREE DEE Cathy was a little envious. Deena was so cool with tech. Not that Cathy would really lust for the gadgets, mind you, but it was dis- turbing to see how easily Dee could get into the latest functions of whatever gadget she found – as long as it was useful for her art. Deena was so driven, so deterministic that way. Whatever was needed to realize her artistic visions, she would do it, even if she needed a PhD in quantum physics for the purpose. Now, Deena had devised a 3D model of a renaissance building. It was complete with the furniture, paintings, wallpapers, ornaments, everything. Except for people; Deena was not into people. Buildings and atmospheres were more her thing, and her crazy surrealistic scifi effects, which in an eerily appropriate way contrasted the historic settings. Flowing wallpapers were really creepy! Anyway, they looked at the model on Deena’s computer, and she explained how her editor software produced various versions of the model, even one in normal compressed video for people who lacked 3D hardware in their phones. They tried viewing the building on Cathy’s old trusty phone. It was not fun, as the download took ages, and the resulting playback was jerky, but still it could be done. On Deena’s phone – not the latest model either – viewing was already quite enjoyable. The initial download wait was long but the model was smoothly ani- mated once it got there. Anyway, Deena explained how she planned to render a string quartet in one room such that if you lacked channel capacity, you could just hear the music and see a still frame portraying the orchestra. If you had a better link you would get the whole 3D works in surround sound. Cathy was not sure if she liked such adaptations or not. In her art, she wanted to portray her subjects (these days, herbs and fl owers) as thoroughly as possible. If the viewer could not get the hires pics, maybe it would be better to abstain completely. Or maybe not. There was some business building up on their web site, and it might be useful to include some self-adaptive content. But would their server allow that? Steve – help! However, the characteristics that affect content adaptation are not restricted to the receiving device’s capabilities. Another factor is network capability. Estimating the time required to transmit a piece of content is determined by not only the network capability, but also current load. As pointed out in Chapter 2, network speed will remain the bottleneck in content transfer in the foreseeable future. However, it can be argued that the increasing compression capability of recent media codecs, such as Advanced Video Coding (AVC) (Marpe et al. 2006), move some of the burden to the processor while easing the requirements of the network throughput. What still needs to be considered is the intended use and desired quality level. For instance, transferring a full 5 Mpix digital photo is not sensible if the photo will be used in a web page only, whereas for printing, a full copy is preferred even though the receiving device may not be able to show the full detail.