SWAPUGC: Software for adaptive playback of geotagged UGC

Currently on the market there is a plethora of affordable dedicated cameras or smartphones, able to record video and timed geospatial data (device location and orientation). This timed metadata can be used to identify relevant (in time and space) recordings. However, there has not been a platform that allows to exploit this information in order to utilize the relevant recordings in an interactive consumption scenario. In this paper we present SWAPUGC, a browser-based platform for building applications that use the accompanying geospatial data to dynamically select the streams for watching an event (or any spatiotemporal reference point). The view selection can be performed either manually, or automatically by a predefined algorithm that switches to the most suitable stream according to the recording characteristics. SWAPUGC is a research tool to test such adaptation algorithms and it is provided as an open-source project, accompanied by an example demo application and references to a compatible dataset and recorder. In this paper, we explain and then demonstrate the capabilities of the platform by an example implementation and examine future prospects and extensions.