DimP (Direct Manipulation Video Player) is a pretty nifty way to control the action in your videos; just touch the image and use your mouse to move the action along.
The idea is best seen - so take a look at the DimP (Direct Manipulation Video Player) video shown below.
(DimP directly manipulate video by touch)
We have Pierre Dragicevic and Gonzalo Ramos to thank for the implementation. Is it really direct manipulation?
Yes. Although the video clip itself is not modified, dragging an object constrained to a trajectory is similar to dragging a slider. The slider's thumb will never stray away from its predefined trajectory, yet we all agree it is being directly manipulated.
Whether it is true direct manipulation or not is actually an ill-posed question. On computer screens, where everything is just pixels, you are never physically manipulating objects. Direct manipulation is always an illusion produced by having user's gestures match the resulting motions on the screen as closely as possible...
So what's being manipulated, exactly? Both the video content (e.g., the things you see moving in the video) and the "tape head"...
Technovelgy readers might also be thinking of the art project Khronos Projector, which is in some ways similar. I had a chance to play with the Khronos Projector myself at NextFest.
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