Superficial Intelligence

Today’s paper is one of those papers where you just have to say “awesome�. So I hope you enjoy it together with the new comic strip.

Paper: Video Browsing by Direct Manipulation (reference at the bottom of this post)

What in the world did they do?

These guys wrote an application that allows for direct video manipulation. This is a video browser that lets you navigate through the video not only using the traditional timeline, but also by dragging objects along their course of movement throughout the video.

What’s so cool about that?

Everything.

Did anything worthwhile come out of it?

Their video browser, called DimP (Direct Manipulation Player).

Why should I care?

As online videos become more and more popular, we start encountering more often situations where a video browser like this one might be useful. Maybe we just want to skip to a specific part of a scene (I’ve seen a few launch videos where I just want to get to the part where the rocket/airplane blasts off). Or maybe we just want to study some complicated motions (like dance moves or a pool shot). Either way, simply having an alternative way of browsing a video is definitely useful.

Now, comic strip time! (click on the image to enlarge it)

Reference: Dragicevic, P., Ramos, G., Bibliowicz, J., Nowrouzezahrai, D., Balakrishnan, R., Singh, K. Video Browsing by Direct Manipulation, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, April 05-April 10, 2008, Florence, Italy