The Level of Interest function was part of research I did over the summer of 2003 as a research intern for the Shared Media Group at Ricoh Innovations, Inc. Ricoh has a large library of video recordings of meetings and presentations created using the portable meeting recorder but not too many people actually used them due to difficulty in actually finding which sections of a meeting are actually worth watching. I created a novel way to use bookmark data that I collected from the various meeting attendees to create a composite fuction describing the attendees Level of Interest in the various segments of the meeting.

LOI data collection work required the creation of multiple prototypes to collect the notes/bookmarks from the meeting attendees. The initial prototype (Figure a) required the meeting attendees to use a handheld barcode scanner to scan a barcode when they took notes.Testing showed that users often forgot to scan barcodes after writing their notes. Some users also wished to have additional functionality of being able to take notes in the past(i.e.: “This note is for the topic discussed 5 minutes ago”). Based on these considerations a second prototype (figure c) was designed to be used by meeting attendees with laptop computers. This prototype allowed users to take notes on their own laptops and gave them the extra options of marking private notes, special note types, historical notes, etc... While the second prototype was more successful, users complained about the high cognitive load of typing notes and choosing type of note during the meeting. This feedback led to a simpler third prototype of a wireless “clicker” device (Figure b), which the user could press in order to bookmark a specific point in the presentation.

The other parallel effort in the LOI curve project was the design of an LOI based video browsing application. Users can go to any point in the presentation by directly clicking on the LOI curve which is used as a basic timeline, marking out user bookmarks and slide transitions. The LOI browser also allows users to manipulate the LOI curve by selecting the users whose data will be used to create the LOI curve. This allows users to select a specific subset of users whose interests may match their own. Additionally the users can select the type of bookmark that is used to create the LOI curve. One example of its use would be to create an LOI curve to find all the interesting questions that were asked during a presentation. Other methods of navigating the video include selecting a slide on the slide thumbnail strip and double clicking on specific user notes if any.

While the first LOI browser was very powerful we also wanted to create a lightweight streaming version of the browser. This was an interactive interface that shows the users the slides corresponding to the video as well as allowind them to browse the video stream by clicking on the LOI curve or clicking on the user notes on the left. It was was completely defined in Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL) which made it standards compliant and platform independent.

This work is currently patent pending.