Watch-and-comment as a paradigm toward ubiquitous interactive video editing

The literature reports research efforts allowing the editing of interactive TV multimedia documents by end-users. In this article we propose complementary contributions relative to end-user generated interactive video, video tagging, and collaboration. In earlier work we proposed the watch-and-comment (WaC) paradigm as the seamless capture of an individual's comments so that corresponding annotated interactive videos be automatically generated. As a proof of concept, we implemented a prototype application, the WaCTool, that supports the capture of digital ink and voice comments over individual frames and segments of the video, producing a declarative document that specifies both: different media stream structure and synchronization. In this article, we extend the WaC paradigm in two ways. First, user-video interactions are associated with edit commands and digital ink operations. Second, focusing on collaboration and distribution issues, we employ annotations as simple containers for context information by using them as tags in order to organize, store and distribute information in a P2P-based multimedia capture platform. We highlight the design principles of the watch-and-comment paradigm, and demonstrate related results including the current version of the WaCTool and its architecture. We also illustrate how an interactive video produced by the WaCTool can be rendered in an interactive video environment, the Ginga-NCL player, and include results from a preliminary evaluation.