In the rapidly evolving landscape of media and technology, the way we interact with and consume media content is undergoing a significant transformation. One of the greatest challenges in this digital age is the difficulty of efficiently retrieving meaningful information from large, often sprawling, media archives. “Revolutionizing Media Interaction: A Novel AI System for Dynamic Narratives from Audiovisual Archives” (REMIT) aims to be at the forefront of addressing this challenge. We will develop an innovative system that leverages cutting-edge AI technologies to create user-driven narratives from the expansive video archive of Radio Television Suisse (RTS). This project will serve as a model for how AI technologies can be used to create immersive, interactive experiences with media archives in the future bringing a radical new dimension to public engagement with audiovisual archives more generally.
REMIT is intended to be a public-facing application, bringing much-needed re-use of archival materials to broadcasters with historical legacy. REMIT will develop a scalable interactive visualization for immersive environments, combined with a novel Interactive Prompt System (IPS), to better engage users and place them at the center of these narratives. An interactive and immersive installation will be designed as the access point for visitors at the new RTS building on the EPFL campus.
This project builds upon the extensive collaboration of the project partners through the SNF Sinergia grant (2021-2025), Narratives from the Long Tail: Transforming Access to AudioVisual Archives. Involving over 120,000 hours of audiovisual archives from RTS, this grant has dealt primarily with the backend infrastructure, metadata extraction using speech-to-text analysis and massive data visualization. REMIT capitalizes on this extensive prior research, developing a significantly new direction through the integration of advanced large language (LLMs) and image models which are maturing at this time. The computational framework of REMIT will be able to unlock new modes of access to large audiovisual archives, allowing the public to benefit from these significant records of Swiss history.