Map-Based Storyboards

Paper: Creating Map-based Storyboards for Browsing Tour Videos

Author: Suporn Pongnumkul, Jue Wang, and Michael Cohen

Comments: Ross

Summary:

This paper focused on taking long tour videos and allowing a user to shrink it the way the want it in order to make the tour video more fun. Often tour videos are long and boring and nobody wants to watch them, so it's almost a waste of time for someone to film them because they almost never show them to people. This application will allow the users to take a long video and extract the "highlights" of it in order to shorten the film so that other people will watch it. The idea was to have a map-based storyboard to go along with the video so that the user could interact with the video. They developed an interactive authoring tool, and there was a viewing tool that you could actually watch the video on. The system took in a video and a map and then the user would process it by using the authoring tool. Once the user has edited the movie in the way that they want the edited portion is passed as an XML configuration into a web-based viewing tool. During this entire process the user is not actually editing the original video so there is no self-destruction going on. The video is still there in case something goes wrong in the editing portion and the user wishes to go back and start over.

The picture above is what the authoring tool looks like. It has the video on the top left corner and then the storyboard map is on the right hand side. The pictures and pin points on the map correspond with each other, and you can sort of see what the pathway looks like. After the video has been edited with this tool, it can then be uploaded into the viewing tool.

This pictures shows what the viewing tool looks like whenever a video is uploaded. The way that these tools were evaluated was by having a group of people answer a few questions about each tool so that the authors could get some input on how the interaction with the tools was. The participants were able to understand them rather quickly and they went through each playing option and the directions that were given to them for the experiment. Most participants preferred the "Playing Highlight" and "Map Navigation" modes because they saved time and showed the whole story. The authoring tool wasn't actually tested on because that would have required the participants to actually film their own videos and edit them themselves. These tests were conducted on videos that were already edited so that the could see how people liked the viewing tool and storyboard that went with the video.

Discussion:

I thought this would be very interesting to actually use because lots of people have videos that they would like to edit whether they be videos of trips somewhere or a wedding video that they would like to shorten to hit the highlights of the time spent. It would have been nicer to see if the authoring tool was easy for people to get used to since that seems to be the entire point of this paper, but knowing that the viewing tool is easy to use will help them in their future work. I think tests need to be done on the authoring tool before one can say that this application would be useful.