From: "Bruce Cohen;;50-662;LP=A;" Subject: Yet Another Proposed Application (YAPA) Date: 22 Jan 91 19:53:24 GMT Organization: Tektronix Inc. 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