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This adaptation has happened fairly quickly on websites, but will it happen as quickly with video? When we can search for and access information anywhere in the video, what does that do for the nature of our engagement with that video? Certainly it opens the door to some very interesting marketing opportunities, with what I've previously described as "product placement on steroids". The ability to click on any item in a video and instantly be connected to more information about that item creates a tremendous opportunity for advertisers. But it also opens the potential for multiple paths through a video. Does watching a video become more like playing a video game, where we can pursue different paths and have different experiences depending on the path we choose? Does a travel video on Prague become an interactive virtual tour, where we choose our own path through Prague? And is that interactive virtual tour assembled on-the-fly from dozens of different video clips? do we assemble content based on our intent with the help of our video search tool? Do video producers take a dramatically more granular approach to producing content, leaving you to assemble the storyline from these individual bits of content, based on what you want to see?
This promises an extraordinarily rich user experience. Consider how this might play out for an individual user. We go to Google video search tool and search for the Loreta, one of the top tourist attractions in Prague. We find a clip that takes us on a quick virtual tour and within the clip we could click on other things of interest. For instance, we could climb to the top of the bell tower and take a look over Prague. We could click on any building and if there was a video available we would be instantly transported to that building. Or, if we choose, we could search for the nearest hotel and find the corresponding video clip. The entire video has been indexed so no matter what we click on, our video search engine can use that to initiate a query and bring us back the resulting clips. The clips are assembled into a virtual montage that we can navigate through depending on our interest areas. We create a virtual version of Prague, assembled from all the video content that's available, and we can access just what we're interested in and search for any content that might be embedded into any of those individual video files. Underneath this layer of video content there could be additional layers of functionality. For instance you could tie it in with mapping functionality, à la Google Earth. You could tie in Web search functionality so that you could easily click through to the relevant websites. This could also provide access to booking engines and a number of other potential actions that we could take.
Such an experience is not that great a stretch from where we are currently at. To see how it might play out take a look at
PhotoSynth View of Piazza San Marco in Venice
It does just what I'm describing with video, only with pictures. It creates a 3-D world from the thousands of pictures that have been publicly shared. I highly recommend taking it for a spin, as it provides a fascinating look at what human computer interfaces can be.
As we start considering the possibilities for video, the problem is we're still stuck in our current paradigm of how we interact with video. My feeling is once indexing technology allows us to truly index the content of the video, the nature of our interaction with video will completely change. We'll take the sensory input we expect from video and extend that into our typical user experience with more types of content. Our interfaces will be more satisfying because they will become more like real life. They will engage more of our senses and put us into a deeper and richer virtual world. More and more, as technology progresses, our interface with technology will start to look more like our experience with the physical world. As this happens, we will have the ability to step from a interface that engages our senses of sight and sound into a more abstract world where we interact with written text. The transition between these two interfaces will be seamless and we can step back and forth as we wish.
The promise of video lies not so much in taking video as we know it and bringing it online. The promise of video is that it provides a distinctly different user experience which could prove to be the new interface to technology. But to make this happen we have to be able to index and search for the content that lies embedded within video. We have to be able to take that video content and manipulate and mold it into a virtual world that we can interact with. And that is the promise that lies within the next-generation video search.
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