Video collections in panoramic contexts

Abstract

Video collections of places show contrasts and changes in our world, but current interfaces to video collections make it hard for users to explore these changes. Recent state-of-the-art interfaces attempt to solve this problem for 'outside->in' collections, but cannot connect 'inside->out' collections of the same place which do not visually overlap. We extend the focus+context paradigm to create a video-collections+context interface by embedding videos into a panorama. We build a spatio-temporal index and tools for fast exploration of the space and time of the video collection. We demonstrate the flexibility of our representation with interfaces for desktop and mobile flat displays, and for a spherical display with joypad and tablet controllers. We study with users the effect of our video-collection+context system to spatio-temporal localization tasks, and find significant improvements to accuracy and completion time in visual search tasks compared to existing systems. We measure the usability of our interface with System Usability Scale (SUS) and task-specific questionnaires, and find our system scores higher.