storyboard

Watching a long unedited video is usually a boring experience. In this paper we examine a particular subset of videos, tour videos, in which the video is captured by walking about with a running camera with the goal of conveying the essence of some place. We present a system that makes the process of sharing and watching a long tour video easier, less boring, and more informative. To achieve this, we augment the tour video with a map-based storyboard, where the tour path is reconstructed, and coherent shots at different locations are directly visualized on the map. This allows the viewer to navigate the video in the joint location-time space. To create such a storyboard we employ an automatic pre-processing component to parse the video into coherent shots, and an authoring tool to enable the user to tie the shots with landmarks on the map. The browser-based viewing tool allows users to navigate the video in a variety of creative modes with a rich set of controls, giving each viewer a unique, personal viewing experience. Informal evaluation shows that our approach works well for tour videos compared with conventional media players.

A history-of-user-operations function helps make applications easier to use. For example, users may have access to an operation history list in an application to undo or redo a past operation. To provide an overview of a long operation history and help users find target interactions or application states quickly, visual representations of operation history have been proposed. However, most previous systems are tightly integrated with target applications and difficult to apply to new applications. We propose an application-independent method that can visualize the operation history of arbitrary GUI applications by monitoring the input and output GUI events from outside of the target application. We implemented a prototype system that visualizes operation sequences of generic Java Awt/Swing applications using an annotated comic strip metaphor. We tested the system with various applications and present results from a user study.