What Did I Miss? Visualizing the Past through Video Traces

Abstract

Always-on media spaces broadcast video between collaborators to provide mutual awareness and to encourage casual interaction. This video can be easily recorded on the fly as a video trace. Ostensibly, people can review this video history to gain a better idea of the activities and availability of their collaborators. Such systems are obviously highly contentious, as they raise significant privacy concerns. However, the ease of capturing video means that video trace systems will appear in the near future. To push the boundaries and encourage debate about video trace technologies within the CSCW community, we created TIMELINE, a highly effective visualization system that combines ideas in slit scanning as used in interactive art to allow people to easily and rapidly explore a video history in detail. We describe its design and implementation, and begin the debate by offering preliminary reflections on how it can be used and misused. To encourage this debate, TIMELINE is freely available for others to try