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

What is DRAGON?

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.

The People Behind DRAGON

DRAGON is a research project by Thorsten Karrer, Malte Weiss, Moritz Wittenhagen, 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.

Related Projects

PocketDRAGON is an implementation of the DRAGON technique for the iPhone. It helps to navigate videos without requiring any valuable screen real estate on the mobile device.
DRAGONEye is a high-performance implementation of the DRAGON technique. It does not require any pre-processing time and is more robust against object occlusions at the same time.

Awards

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

Downloads

Software

• Demo executable (204 KB) (Universal Binary, requires Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard" or later)
• If you are using Windows, check out DimP
• 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

2009

Christian Brockly. Evaluation of direct manipulation techniques for in-scene video navigation. Master's thesis, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany, February 2009. .

2008

	Moritz Wittenhagen. DragonEye - Fast Object Tracking and Camera Motion Estimation. Master's thesis, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany, October 2008. .
	Thorsten Karrer, Malte Weiss, Eric Lee, and Jan Borchers. DRAGON: A Direct Manipulation Interface for Frame-Accurate In-Scene Video Navigation. In Proceedings of the CHI 2008 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Florence, Italy, April 2008. ACM Press. Best CHI 2008 Note Award, .

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