VERTIGO: Find, Enjoy and Share Media Trails across Physical and Social Contexts Luca Galli 1 , Renata Guarneri 1 , Jukka Huhtamaki 2 1 CREATE-NET, Trento, Italy 2 Hypermedia Laboratory, Tampere University of Technology, Tampere, Finland lg@lgalli.it renata.guarneri@create-net.org jukka.huhtamaki@tut.fi Abstract. On the grounds of media sharing in social networks, visualisation mash-ups and early hypertext idea of associative “trails”, the opportunity for a new system to explore and enjoy connections among mainly linear media is devised. A novel system called VERTIGO is to be crafted to tackle the current limitations in media consumption across different contexts. On the end-user side, VERTIGO would provide a context-aware, personalised and proactive dashboard with innovative discovery and interaction capabilities; on the enterprise side, media professionals would gain access to a common platform enabling new collaboration models in the value network. Keywords. Multimedia, Media consumption, Video, Television, Music, Context-awareness, Home, mobile, Geolocation, Social Network, Mashup, Visualisation, Scenarios, Business Model, Value Network 1 Introduction The wave of social networks and Web 2.0 services is putting the media industries under an increasing pressure. Long standing models in broadcasting, movies and music sectors are threatened by the overwhelming success of the Internet. Yet there is limited experience of successful endeavours in bringing the best out of the once clearly separated worlds of mass media and personal technologies. Interactive television experiments, for example, have been around for many years, but they have still to deliver on the promise of a big change [1]. Of course, games make for a huge realm, but despite some contaminations they are not to be mixed with mainly linear media. In this respect, novel approaches to create more interactive media experiences are needed as ever before [2]. VERTIGO 1 aims at tackling this challenge by focusing on the opportunity to expand and enrich the users’ capabilities in finding, enjoying and sharing media connections or “trails” across the different physical and social 1 “Vertigo” is one of Alfred Hitchcock's most powerful, deep, and stunningly beautiful films (in widescreen 70 mm VistaVision); this classic 1958 noir, that functions on multiple levels simultaneously, has been a recurring case in the very initial project discussions and it is actually included in one of the project original scenarios.