Technology
There have been many recent advances in internet and video technology, including mobile and wireless systems allowing us to receive a high-quality resolution video on our desktops as well as a variety of mobile deceives. This access has been made possible by high speed networks providing high bandwidth which, will soon allow us to receive multiple real-time videos.
The present invention relates to a system and a method for displaying and retrieving video data in an interactive system for viewing. The basic element of the proposed method for creating an interactive user interface is an interactive cube with eight nodes, as presented in an example in Figure 1 (below). Each node is linked to a specific video, or eventually to another level of a cube interface. In this specific example, the interactive cube presents a set of current news video clips on Iraq war, combined from different parts of the world. Each node contains a small video icon. The content creator can combine video clips from different sources and create a tree-dimensional view of videos. The user can navigate through the cube space and the cube will rotate accordingly. As the user traverses a node (video icon) with the mouse, textual information about the related video will appear on the screen, as indicated in Figure 1. The user can select and play the video by clicking on a node. The selected video will begin playing on the screen, as illustrated in Figure 1.
Applications
In the emerging field of internet applications relating to entertainment and news, there are a great number of applications which can take advantage of the proposed hypercube-based user interface. Particularly, all the companies, which offer video applications (e.g. entertainment, news, etc.) currently using a tremendous number of videos. The proposed hyperlink structure will help them better organize and link these videos by their theme, and in space and time, present the videos in a better method to the user. The user will have a completely new experience in traveling through time and space using the hypercubes by selecting and watching the videos.
The proposed interactive hypercube-based system can also be used for visualization and retrieval of other types of computer data including data, numeric, textual, audio, or multimedia files. In these cases, the nodes in the cube will present a general file rather then a video clip.
Advantages
- Easy to view multiple videos with a simple text preview
- Search large video databases efficiently
- View video sources from different sites
State of Development
- Working prototype available within next 6 months (by 05/08)
