Video Magnifier

The Video Magnifier was developed as part of the Dynamic Documents project at Apple. It addressed the problem of how to provide someone a powerful overview of a time-based video event such a movie or a image database. The first implementation of the Video Magnifier (implemented by Jonathan Cohen) would provide the user a set of still frames sampled at equal intervals throughout the video. It also allowed users to expand or contract the "grain" of the sample by manipulating a selector over the time-bar representating the movie. By clicking anywhere in the temporal overview, the user could generate another hierarhcial sampling of the region designated by the magnifier selection box. In this way the user could build up a representation of a movie which allowed him to situate the finest-grain sampling in it's hiearchical context.

Later versions of the Video Magnifier explored the use of the using visual scene changes as methods of sampling. It also generated future techniques of time-magnification (see Video Smears.) We were awareded a patent on the Video Magnifier; it was also publishedas an article in the proceedings of Chi '92.