A Direct Manipulation Interface
for Frame-Accurate In-Scene Video Navigation

DRAGON is a direct-manipulation interaction technique for frame-accurate navigation in video scenes. This technique benefits tasks such as professional and amateur video editing, review of sports footage, and forensic analysis of video scenes.

By directly dragging objects in the scene along their movement trajectory, DRAGON enables users to quickly and precisely navigate to a specific point in the video timeline where an object of interest is in a desired location. Examples include the specific frame where a sprinter crosses the finish line, or where a car passes a traffic light.

Through a user study, we have shown that DRAGON significantly reduces task completion time for in-scene navigation tasks by an average of 19–42% compared to a standard timeline slider. Qualitative feedback from users is also positive, with multiple users indicating that the DRAGON interaction felt more natural than the traditional slider for in-scene navigation.


DRAGON is a research project by Thorsten Karrer, Malte Weiss, Jan Borchers and others at the Media Computing Group. It is funded in part through the German B-IT Foundation and the UMIC DFG Excellence Initiative.


Our CHI 2008 Note (see below) received a CHI Best Note Award.

Software

• Demo executable (204 KB) (Universal Binary, requires Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard" or later)
• You also need a (large) suitable demo video (147 MB).

Video Overview

• Video (QuickTime, 28.8 MB). This explains and shows the interaction technique. It was also included on the CHI 2008 Conference DVD.

Publications

• Thorsten Karrer, Malte Weiss, Eric Lee, and Jan Borchers. DRAGON: A Direct Manipulation Interface for Frame-Accurate In-Scene Video Navigation. Proceedings of the CHI 2008 International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Florence, Italy, April 5-10, 2008), ACM Press, New York, 2008, pp. 247-250. Final draft (3 MB), official version from the ACM Digital Library and the CHI 2008 proceedings. Presented in the Improved Video Navigation and Capture late afternoon session at CHI on Monday, April 7, 2008.