Slashdot Mirror
Will Video Surfing Become Reality?
alinv writes "Australia's CSIRO has developed a multi-media browsing tool callled CMWeb, which makes surfing audio and video content as esy as text (view a screenshot here). The tool, called Continuous Media Web (CMWeb), enables user to activate a link within a video or audio file,and be taken to a related clip in another file, and then return to the original or follow further links into other subject areas, in much the same way they currently do with Web pages."
Surely the video isn't big enough to stand on!
Will Video Surfing Become Reality?
It already is, I call it "changing the channel."
It's not going to really take off until it's much, much easier for the average joe to make the content than it is now.
What's this Submit thingy do?
Why would anyone want to watch Wil Wheaton's videos?
Not that I want to be seen as too negative or anti progress but, why would I want to do that? The web is bloated as it is. All the animations and stuff that disturb you when you read a text :-/
IAAAL - I am actually a lawyer
This is rather like flash, but for video content rather than animated vector graphics. Maybe not even that. More like a video file + markup much like something which could be played in a specialised player, but superimposing links? Doesn't seem that revolutionary to me, the DVD format already allows for something like this - albeit in a more rigid form.
However, the reason this is particularly interesting to the Slashdot crowd is that
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
i'm sure i remember seeing hyperlinked video somewhere before.
*listens to some ambient*
*totally chilled*
yelling voice: OH AND BTW, IF YOU LIKE THIS TRACK, CLICK HERE FOR MORE!
*gaaah*
Of course it runs NetBSD. BTC: 1NT7QvbetmANwaMzhpVL6
Good to see more Xanadu ideas coming to fruition.
With everyone already constantly bitching and griping about Flash? Not likely.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
Someone has to say it:
"Browsing through my pr0n mpeg collection will be never be the same again..."
well, from what I gather, this is not so much a way of surfing the net with video as it is a way to find related audio/video content. It kinda strikes me as a relational database, but all the objects are audio and video.
I have no regrets, this is the only path.
My whole life has been "UNLIMITED BLADE WORKS"
I don't see anything here I didn't already saw in the MPEG-4 specifications years ago.
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html
what advantages does this new system have over video inside html ?
Is this something like a video hyperlink?
Watch Seinfeld, move that little mouse-knob now on your TV remote, click on the box of Junior Mints, and see a full Junior Mints commercial?
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
How do I activate a link in an audio file?
On a visible interface (video or GUI) I can think about something that I can activate by a sort of "point & click" interface. But on an audio stream?
Especially since audio is depending on time. Just think that you want to follow a link on the "bottom" of an audio file... should I wait until the link somehow passes by?
Or do I have to think of something interactive with sppech input like
Computer: "This article was first posted on Slashdot..."
Me: "Stop here and tell me more about that slashdot thing"
Sounds a little bit like "Star Trek" to me.
I don't think this would be useful to anyone except people who make online encyclopedias. Many online encyclopedias use a video-text format for conveying multimedia information to the user, but this wouldn't be feasible to the average user.
Founder of Mirror Moon - Tsukihime Game Trans
You and me, and a vcr pulled by a powerboat.
This reminds me of a friend years ago who came up to me and said "I've got a great idea. We know about video games. How about audio games? We should invent those".
I've not heard from him since, but I am pretty safe to assume he is not a multi-billion dollar audiogame magnate at this time: no-one is.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
and of course, this fuck will be granted a patent, just because nobody else bothered to develop something wich will be useless for the next 20 years
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
It's CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific & Industrial Research Organsation). Thanks. And a bit of trivia.. they're the only organisation with their own .au second-level domain "csiro.au".
This would really suck with video, where you have to notice the links at the right time. And what about audio? Will the other pages continue making noises quietly in the background? Wait for their turn? overpower anything else I may be listening?
In Murphy We Turst
"Would you like to know more?"
See xanadu. This idea has been around for a looong time.
The majority of the world (hey its changing)is still on dial-up... Im out here in the middle of the country so I doubt video surfing will happen over here any time soon.
For the most part, this will only make for very annoying ads that suck up gobs of bandwidth. Just look at what they have done with flash animation?
My rights don't need management.
i am sure we will have enough advance technology to making video surfing a reality, but what about human brain's capacity to process and digest the information given to us in this mode. we are already facing a Information Overload as it is. Moreover the brain's capacity is becomming smaller, due to in-digestion of information (your brain and stomach work in a similar fashion,to process and retain information), and less time for thinking and comptemplation. :)
A good book to read about mind and information processing is Steven Pinker's "How Mind Works"
And I for one do not wanna see any pop-up banners in video surfing.
Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
Why not create a simple XML language that could be associed with the embedded video on a webpage? Example:
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
It's the CSIRO.
Feed me a stray cat.
Text does not have to be read from start to finish to provide a satisfactory result to the viewer - that's why it's so good on the web. Video is intended to be viewed from start to finish - I can't imagine clicking the back button to finish watching Austin Powers while I just finished watching the original to get the joke reference. Ok, maybe once or twice but more than that and you'll spend countless hours infront of the TV going from video to video and never really acc.....oh wait.....nevermind.
It's so completely extraneous and useless that it will be commonplace and have wide acceptance like anything else that hits the lowest common denominator in our species.
Now if I can just think up of an invention stupid enough and completely useless, I can rake it in... hmmm...
"Last one in is a rotten goblin!" - Kepp
Which obviously won't be easy enough for the average /. ed ;)
Wow, reading this article you would have thought the average "video-surfer" was on an OC3...
Maybe 5-10 years from now, but not now... not this way...
It's the CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific & Industrial Research Organisation) .
One of the most important publicly funded organisations in the country. When they finally get some credit for their work it would be nice to get the name right.
I don't wanna come across all slashdot or anything but thats....
CSIRO (see www.csiro.au)
not CISRO (see www.cisro.com.au)
'Syro', not 'Sisro'...
just as soon as FMV games get back in swing.
I know you were joking, but I want my Karma, so I'm going to reiterate your post in a serious tone.
And here I am thikning about a big screen video projection screen with a virtual wave and a long or short board on hydraulics and possibly a powerglove or a headset!!!
Silly me...
Although come on...it's better than the technology in the article!
Rob
Posted on pajonet's community portal:
A man gets arrested for video surfing because his son dies while wave surfing...
Surely that is CSIRO and screenshot?
Or is the perview button not wroking?
Videos, with subtitles. CLicking on subtitles takes you to new pop-over windows. Switching to one of these freezes other windows. Close a main window, the one you come back to starts-up again.
Now _this_ would make video surfing fun. Something like the 'information videos' we see on MTV, but with hyperlinks.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
but then I thought well it has to start somewhere, hands up all of you that were on the internet 10 years ago (ok bad audience to ask in!) but you get the picture
I think in 10 or so years time everyone will be wondering how they survived without their inter-thing-a-mabob that does everything and will probably be talking about if going to the local implant shop to get the latest wotsit 'uploaded' is a good idea or will take up too much space.
All I see now is blonde, brunette, redhead.
/. back in your time machine to the average person in the seventies or eighties (yeah, and a browser and the h/w to view it on...) and see if they can read it through the distraction of the hyperlinks.
Just like product placement is now only sub-consciously perceived by most viewers.
Take
Ok, so maybe the "news" will be up-to date when you show it to them, but that wasn't the point...
This kind of thing is great for "real" internet users, by which I mean people paying for broadband and just surfing web pages.
The rest of us have already got however much bandwidth we have pretty much saturated with p2p clients. If we had more bandwidth we'd just download more p2p stuff and faster.
I know that I personally am not going to have loads of bandwith just sitting there waiting to be used for video surfing, it'll be being used for p2p.
Ok, it is at this point that someone is going to suggest traffic (bandwidth) shaping so that your p2p is using all the bandwidth, but it gives way to your video web surfing thing when you use it.
So, I want to ask if anyone knows of a bandwidth shaper, software solution for Win32 that works at the application level ??????
graspee
Remember when VRML was going to change the Internet? No more text just big 3d world with avatars running around everywhere. When was the last time you visited a VRML site? I don't understand why so many people want to augment or replace simple text and graphics. Sure flash and video and audio add to the web and are great for some applications, but text is trhe real killer app on the web. It is easy and cheap to produce, and thanks to services like babelfish it is easy to translate. Not to mention the problems of getting acurate search results just based on descriptions of viedo or audio.
I think Konqueror has the best implementation of "video surfing." That is, as long as its on your hard drive. If its online, then its just like any other.
Not by the way that I really rated Microcosm, it was really quite buggy and was overtaken by HTML, which of course turned out to be the category-killer in the hypertext arena.
It is already on the w3.org (the people who brought you HTML and XML standards) website, and it is called SMIL.
There was an episode of SCTV with "audiogames". It featured Jerry Todd hitting buttons on a remote control, which made the guns go off(asteroids-like game). There was also a baseball game. Hilarious commercial.
Just my 0.02â
OK, this is converting or adding text to media files so they can be searched via text, right? how is this creating a new version of the web?
What I want to see is an image or video search that actually searches using the same type of info. you submit a picture and say "find pictures of this!" or even sketch (which would be like the smart text searches now) an image and say "find something like this!"
converting everything to text might be useful, but it keeps us locked to text for everything.
So, that TV thing on my desk would be likeâ¦. my TV thing in my entertainment center! And my MOUSE would be likeâ¦â¦ my REMOTE CONTROL! This is a GREAT advancement for our civilization!
buy a Mac if you want to impress people with screenshots.
Practice Kind Randomness and Beautiful Acts of Nonsense.
....when it was called "channel surfing"
I had heard that IBM had this in it's OS/2 media player way back around the Warp 4 days. OS/2 shipped with a bunch of multimedia players and it was said that they had clickable regions in a video stream working.
;)
I never saw it but then again, I never saw OS/2 for the PPC and IT existed.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
It won't become a reality until they can build a site that delivers text/pictures that can survive a slashdotting. Seriously, this technology occupies the same realm as Flash. Used by webdesigners who do not consider the fact that some people can not, and others will not, get broadband. i.e. it will get used by entertainment companies selling entertainment to those audiences from which can can extract a fee - those rich enough. This technology has little or no bearing on useful information transfer to mass populations in the near future, and yes that is a political statement. I also remember hearing about this ages ago related to mpeg-4, but more than this, audiio/visual material unlike text has no effective way of being scanned. Sure you might develop a language to label the content (and thus make is searchable) but being able to search material does not allow you to "skim-read" as it were. Text will never die because it is the least linear format we have available. It also argueably presents the most information with the least preproduction. You won't see interactive video on the bleeding edge of news, because (like flash) no matter how much you refine the production process it will still take much longer to prepare information in that format. That said, there are some interesting applications for more "static" information.
"Do you want to know more?"
Shake and shake
the ketchup bottle.
None will come,
and then a lot'll.
Odd though - the other posters are right in that it sounds alot like SMIL, but since QT 5 (for PC and Mac) you can embed Flash layers on the view as overlays.
What I see is:
* Streaming video
* Triggered text tracks
* Links (either external, internal, scheduled or overlayed/flash)
Nothing new, but maybe I should download it first and then try it, and then comment...um, wait. Nevermind. Forgot where I was...
Either a slightly more advanced form of flash, HTML animations, or those interactive Java applets. Already we've got nice Java applets where you can browse cars interiors, houses, etc - perhaps video could be much the same except in a less of a "static scene" fashion.
How about internet TV? We're fast enough to manage that now in many locations - a nice subscription model to proper internet channels (more like real cable/sat channels than a lot of current 'clip' crap is) would be nice - in which case you could add clickable links in the show or whilst channel browsing, etc.
Not really a huge lot of applications beyond the current scope of the internet. The biggest use I see is advertising - such as if you can click the Pepsi can that Joey is holding on "friends" and get dumped into the latest Pepsi promo contest or website. It would be neat for Easter eggs as well - or things like one-click online VCR, etc etc.
Thanks for all the "insightful" responses. I did not know that real audiogames existed, and after my friend proposed the idea, I thought about it for a time and figured that audio "action-arcade" games were not possible.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Microsoft will hopefully patent this before the open source world gets a hold of this. We need more proprietary standards to increase national security. The last thing we want to do is have the Chinese and terrorists have access to our source code and to our internet.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Microsoft should take this and make it easier to use, and release a new proprietary browser, or perhaps enhance internet explorer and pack it inside Windows Longhorn. Lets not forget a patent would be needed to prevent Apple and Communists from hiijacking this new promising technology.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
By replacing banner ads with video ads, a company could then send millions of emails to slashdot users such as fruey with real video advertisements, even better a website such a slashdot could actually make a profit for the first time every by adding high quality video ads and charging about the price of a superbowl ad.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
(No profit involved)
I've never liked the phrase information overload. As I see it, there are two possible states regarding information. Having a whole lot of it, or not having enough. If I were given the choice, I will opt for the former over the latter everytime.
I don't mean to rip on stonebeat, but "Information Overload" is a phrase tailor made for a government censor, who wants to cut back our access to information, while at the same time, telling us it's for our own good.
I know, offtopic, I'm sorry, but it's a pet peeve.
"Inattention makes clowns of us all" -Bean
Audio and video surfing is already here. It's called Winamp 2.91. Yeah it's got shoutcast built in and now a new thing called Internet TV which is basically Nullsoft Public Acces TV. It's starting to catch on too, there are a number of shows ranging from someone getting drive thru at taco bell to shows like Cartoon Network's Auqa Team Hunger Force. So who needs cable when you have a broadband connection.
MoRe... LaTeR... -=PJK=-
How ironic, this coming from Australia - the land of the internet cap!
I notice on their web page that 'business approach' is placed well above anything to do with research approach. Is the object of their research to learn new stuff or to make money? Hurray for the new CSIRO! (not)
Bah... this is just regurgitated quicktime VR, which is hypercard with nice video...
Is this really any different from a web page with the links on the side instead of in the video?
Bob: Hey, hit stop! Rewind, rewind, click there, click there!
Fred: I'm tryin, I'm tryin dernit!
Bob: No, no, not there, forward forward, No, stop, backup, backup, click now click now before the link disappears in the next scene! AGGGH!
(*Dislaimer: this is a joke, I didn't even read the article*)
You're forgetting that the guy who's writing the software was the president of the SLUG for a few years, is the author of Sweep, and has been advocating and writing free software for about ten years.
Also, in the page linked, it states that they will not be taking out a patent and are meeting with the IETF and W3C to formalise the tech as a standard.
BTW, http://www.annodex.net/ has more and better info.
Hi. I work for Bavisoft, one of the companies mentioned that produce Audio Games for the blind. Our flagship title, Grizzly Gulch, is an adventure game, but contrary to a previous post we were able to create arcade games as well. We have embedded them into our adventure to give the game player more control over the environment. In Grizzly Gulch, the layer gets into gunfights in real time and has to shoot the bad guys. We use steroe sound and positioning to simulate the environment with sound only. The palyer adjusts his/her positioning just as a graphical game would require, but the sound is what changes.
Check us out at: www.bavisoft.com