The AOF (Authoring on the Fly) system as an example for efficient and comfortable browsing and access of multimedia data

Multimedia is more and more becoming a ubiquitous part of our life, because of the tremendous advancements in recording, storing, and processing, which have been achieved over the last couple of years. In the (not so far) future, we will be confronted with innumerable amounts of this kind of data. As a consequence, users need to be able to easily access the data, to browse through it, to filter and retrieve required information, and so on. In this paper we will illustrate this scenario using an example application from the teaching and learning scenario. We will introduce the AOF system for automatic presentation recording, which was developed by our research group and which can be used to support and enlarge traditional learning. When using recorded presentations for teaching at our university, we identified several requirements and features which should be provided to achieve a high usability. We will show the user interaction functionality which we integrated in the AOF system to fulfill these needs. Techniques ranging from an appropriate presentation of retrieval results to functions for easy and comfortable navigation in a multimedia file will be discussed. While originally being developed for the teaching and learning scenario, the solutions we propose are useful for any application where intensive user interaction with multimedia data is required.