Reflective Viewing and Interactive Synchronization in Hypermedia Editing

Information and Communications Research Laboratories Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd. 006, Kadoma, Kadoma-shi, OSAKA, 571, JAPAN In this paper, some concepts that are important for hypermedia editing are discussed. At first, the concept named “reflective viewing” is introduced. Reflective viewing is such aconcept that when an user do something, then he/she can immediately get the result of that operation. This reflective viewing gives users trial and error hypermedia editing. Next, the concept named “interactive synchronization” is introduced. This interactive synchronization concept has three features as follows; (a) Dynamic Buttons. (b) Objects an user focuses are interactively set front in the hypermedia. (c) Relationship of synchronization is independent from clip video’s play speed. Developping interactive synchronization concept, we introduced event network graph representation. After that, we implemented a hypermedia editor based on above concepts, which can treat text, graphics, clip video and buttons as objects. As a result, it achieves programless and “trial and error” hypermedia editing. INTRODUCTION Recently, personal computers have grown up so powerful that they have the ability to handle hypermedia. The hypermedia enables us to represent information with proper media as text, graphics, sound, video and so on[l]. Moreover it offers us a flexible retrieval method according to our association process[l J. Hypermedia is useful. But it is still difficult for many users to built up hypermedia itself. DATABASE SYSTEMS FOR ADVANCED APPLICATIONS ‘91 Ed. A. Makinouchi @World Scientific Publishing Co. In this paper, some aproaches to resolve that problem is described. REFLECTIVE VIEWING On DTP, “trial and error” editing is implemented with WYSIWYG concept. The key of “trial and error” processing is that the result of an user’s trial is reflected immediately on screen, and he/she can confirm it. We call this concept “reflective viewing”. Reflective viewing is important not only on DTP, but on hypermedia editing. Mentioned above, reflective viewing is popular on text and graphics editing. There is, however, no hypermedia editing systems which realize all operations both in space and in time according to reflective viewing concept. Our objective is offering such hypermedia editorwhich can treat text, graphics and “clip video” as objects and realize reflective viewing concept, where clip video means the video object clipped its time range within full time range of an optical video disk and it can be played as moving pictures. DIRECT VIDEO MANIPULATION To handle video, we’ve already developped the video interpolation hardware[2], and the video manager which is a set of system calles in operating system layer[3]. We implement a hypermedia editor on BTRONl specification operating system[4] that provides multi task and multi window environment. BTRONl specification[5] recommends application software which treats text and graphics to observe a manner of human machine interface to guarantee compatibility of operations[6]. The manner is called TRON manner, and it consists of “direct manipulation” and “noun-verb model”, that means, after objects selection, an user can do something on it. We adopt this TRON manner for text and graphics, and apply it for clip video. So if an user has already used some application software on BTRONI specification operating system, he/she can treat clip video by analogy.