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From: brucec%phoebus.labs.tek.com@RELAY.CS.NET (Bruce Cohen;;50-662;LP=A;)
Newsgroups: sci.virtual-worlds
Subject: Yet Another Proposed Application (YAPA)
Message-ID: <14917@milton.u.washington.edu>
Date: 22 Jan 91 19:53:24 GMT
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This one crept up on me in the shower while I was free-associating on some
of the subjects that interest me; VR and video came together to produce:

    The Virtual Video Editing Bench

The idea being that the space in front of you contains a large number of
virtual video screens, each of which displays a still or moving video image
which might be used as a source for the final video stream you are
producing.  Each video input stream is just a series of video frames;
conceptually you can think of them as the outputs of VCRs, cameras, film
chains, scanners, or whatnot, but actually, they're likely to be compressed
bitmap files on disk, backed up by some large capacity tertiary storage
like optical disk or tape.  The resolution of the view can be controlled so
that you only render the full video resolution of a given screen when you
are looking directly at it.

Each screen can be controlled by gestures made at or on the screen.  You
could, for instance, start a stream running by tapping the image of the
screen once, and stop it with another tap.  Slow motion and fast motion
could be controlled by a waving motion, or the "taffy-pulling" signal used
by studio directors to signal an announcer to slow down or speed up.

Still images could just be grabbed and dragged to the output screen, and
connections from a moving input stream to the output coud be done by
dragging or by pointing at the input, crooking the pointing finger to grab,
then uncrooking it over the output.  Note that there might be more than one
connection at a time, since you might want multiple images going into an
effects generator for fades, wipes, and mattes, and a connection from the
output of that generator to the output screen.

You might want to have more than one screen on a single stream.  For
instance, suppose you want to match the action in a shot to the action
in the same scene a few seconds before.  You might have two screens, controlled
separately, on the same scene, several seconds apart in time. 

The advantage of VR in this sort of application is the ability to have as
many screens as you need at one time; you could create more with a gesture.
Also, the connections between video streams and screens is highly flexible,
and control is based on gestures rather than a complex series of button
pushes.

I'm sure there are other applications similar to this in that there are
large and variable number of things to be viewed and controlled, most of
the operator's attention is on a few at a time, but she wants to be able to
switch attention and control back and forth rapidly and unpredictably.

--
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Speaker-to-managers, aka
Bruce Cohen, Computer Research Lab        email: brucec@tekchips.labs.tek.com
Tektronix Laboratories, Tektronix, Inc.                phone: (503)627-5241
M/S 50-662, P.O. Box 500, Beaverton, OR  97077