Direct Manipulation in Videos

A group of people from Toronto University have come up with an ingenious way to manipulate videos. Traditionally this is done using some kind of "bar", but what if you could simply drag each element right in the video itself.

This is the concept of Direct Manipulation Video, and by the looks of it, it is pretty cool. Check out the demonstration and the "how it works" videos below.

Demonstration

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How it works

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Of course usability professionals, like me, will quickly point out that this is not a perfect way to manipulate videos. The biggest problem is that you do not know what can be manipulated without having to mouse over the video in order to find a hot-spot (remember "Mystery Meat Navigation"), or watch the video from start to finish to see what moves - and thus can be manipulated.

This is however still a very important experiment. And it could be quite useful as a supplementary navigation option.

This concept has also been explored by several advertisers, which is... neat!

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(via LabConfidental and Dimp)

Comments

George Zhang - May. 28, 2008

Very cool idea.Does it need a big processing ability of the PC?

Thomas Baekdal - May. 29, 2008

I don't think so, most video players already do a lot of pixel processing.

Niels - May. 29, 2008

Nice technology. It could change a lot for editors that prepare news items and documentaries, instead of time orient editing they can now focus on the content. It would be nice if such a feature is implemented in editing programs and that you can edit the video in a similar way.

lqd - May. 29, 2008

what if you had a button that would highlight every draggable area on the video ?

at first i thought this would allow basically to drag almost everything that had moved over a certain threshold, but after reading your comment about the discoverability of those hot areas, i'm not so sure anymore. i'll need to try it myself.

do you also think it's more a problem related to the ui of the particular video player, than caused by the technology itself ?

Thomas Baekdal - May. 29, 2008

do you also think it's more a problem related to the ui of the particular video player, than caused by the technology itself ?
- lqd

Good question. I think I will say that it is probably a combination. I think when the technology advances, they are likely to find other interaction methods that would make it easier to navigate.

Right now it is liniar - which is really the main problem. A way to solve that could be; if you had a video from a concert, the technology - in time - could allow you to take the lead singer and place her at any point of the stage - and the video player would find that spot in the video where that was. Then you wouldn't have to know how something has moved around, because the video would find the closest match to any given position.