ViDi: Virtual Director of Video Lectures

Abstract

Many educational institutes are making lecture recordings widely available to improve the students’ learning experience, but the viewing experience is quite poor (e.g., fixed camera pointed to the classroom and/or slideshow). This can jeopardize the benefits of the learning process based on video lectures. In this paper, we propose Virtual Director, a system designed to improve the viewing experience through an automated direction of video lectures. Virtual Director captures the classroom scenario, understands the semantic content of the lecture and produces a video with a layout that changes according to the semantic content and according to movie theory rules. A prototype, developed with off-the-shelf technologies, shows the feasibility of the approach and a preliminary evaluation confirmed that Virtual Director might improve the viewing experience of video lectures.