Interactive video on WWW: Beyond VCR-like interfaces

The WWW is evolving into a predominantly visual medium. The demand for access to images and video has been increasing rapidly. Interactive Video systems, which provide access to the content in video archives, are starting to emerge on the www. Partly due to the two-dimensional nature of the web, and partly due to the fact that images that comprise the video are two dimensional, most of these systems provide a VCR-like interface (play, fast-forward, reverse, etc., with additions like object selection, motion specification in the image space, and viewpoint selection). The basis of this paper is the realization that the video streams represent projections of a three-dimensional world, and the user is interested in this three-dimensional content and not the actual configuration of pixels in the image space. In this paper, we justify this intuition by enumerating the information-bearing entities that the user is interested in, and the information specification mechanisms that allow the user to query upon these entities. We will describe how such a intuitive system could be implemented using WWW technologies — VRML, HTML, and HTTP — and present our current WWW prototype which is based on extensions to some of these standards. This system is built on top of our multiple perspective interactive video ( MPI Video) paradigm which provides a framework for the management of and interactive access to multiple streams of video data capturing different perspectives of related events.