Brave New Interfaces

The practicalities mean that tomorrow’s interfaces will act as a front end for entire content management systems, not just streaming servers, and may require links to GIS systems should a speaker reference a location near where she was presenting. This means tomorrow’s capture systems must act as digital asset management (DAM) systems for all digital assets, or at least link to other DAMs, while playback interfaces must be able to display this content in a meaningful manner at the appropriate time. Just as today one might choose to view information regarding an artist while listening to music in popular audio jukebox programs, so too will streaming video viewers be able to set preferences that allow on-the-fly reconfiguration to the viewing environment best suited for their experience at any given moment.

Another corporate sub-vertical that would benefit from immersive playback interfaces is corporate campus surveillance. Streaming interface manufacturers would be remiss in simply replicating the 4, 8, 16, or 32-window interfaces currently in vogue in campus surveillance systems. These multi-window interfaces are limited by hardware technology that stagnated years ago and have finite limitations that stifle innovative surveillance practices. Darim Corporation (www.darimcctv.com) may have the best example of an innovative surveillance user interface: its HotActions and Spider 3D products allow a campus to be laid out in a standard 3D program, such as discreet 3ds max, with separate video streams represented by cameras and virtual monitors that grow to full screen as one navigates the 3D environment and zooms in on a particular building or floor. This model gives the campus surveillance team the extra edge, without the confusion of trying to determine where one of 32 images displayed on a screen is geographically located.

Education
In much the same way, educational institutions can use these same tools to keep their physical campuses safe. But streaming media provides many additional benefits in an educational setting. As more universities look to attract non-traditional students—who may attend on-campus classes infrequently due to work conflicts or geographic limitations—tomorrow’s interface must provide distance-education students the same immersive environment that on-campus students receive. During a live classroom lecture, distance-education students using tomorrow’s user interfaces may experience Flash graphics that appear at specific, timed talking points to "invite" a viewer to mouse over and open glossary information that augments the professor’s lecture, or additional references to video and text to which the professor alludes during the course of the lecture. Take, for example, a literature professor’s comments about a particular book or author. Given the work that several companies, such as Pictron, are doing to marry speech to text databases with robust search tools, tomorrow’s user interfaces may attempt to Google the author’s bibliography during the lecture and present its findings to both the professor and the distance-education students.

Since tomorrow’s interfaces also might be able to tie the GIS or 3D information of the campus into a virtual world that distance education students can access to move easily from class to class, the once-popular telephone slogan, "It’s the next best thing to being there," may morph into "It’s like being there, only better."