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
- Andreas Nett. Finding Cognitive Strategies for Navigating with 1D-Controls. Diploma Thesis, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, November 2012.
- Thorsten Karrer, Moritz Wittenhagen and Jan Borchers. DragLocks: Handling Temporal Ambiguities in Direct Manipulation Video Navigation. In CHI '12: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems,May 2012.
- Benjamin Walther-Franks, Marc Herrlich, Thorsten Karrer, Moritz Wittenhagen, Roland Schröder-Kroll, Rainer Malaka and Jan Borchers. Dragimation: Direct Manipulation Keyframe Timing for Performance-based Animation. In GI '12: Proceedings of the 2012 Graphics Interface Conference, pages 101–108,Toronto, Ont., Canada, Canada, May 2012.
- Alisa Novosad. Object Selection and Adaptive Trajectories in DRAGON. Diploma Thesis, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, February 2012.
- Anne Kathrein. Event Detection in Videos based on Object Trajectories. Bachelor's Thesis, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, September 2011.
- Christian Corsten. DragonFly: Spatial Navigation for Lecture Videos. In CHI '10: Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pages 4387–4392,April 2010.
- Christian Corsten. DragonFly: Reviewing Lecture Recordings with Spatial Navigation. Bachelor's Thesis, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, October 2009.
- Thorsten Karrer, Moritz Wittenhagen and Jan Borchers. PocketDRAGON: a direct manipulation video navigation interface for mobile devices. In MobileHCI '09: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services, pages 47:1–47:3, ACM, September 2009.
- Christian Brockly. Evaluation of direct manipulation techniques for in-scene video navigation. Diploma Thesis, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, February 2009.
- 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 CHI '08: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pages 247–250, ACM Press, Florence, Italy, April 2008.