DimP - A Direct Manipulation Video Player

DimP is a video player that allows to browse video clips by directly manipulating their content.

The idea of using direct manipulation for controlling video playback has been first exploited in NTT-AT's Dragri multimedia authoring system (Web Page in Japanese). The system dates back from 2002 but remained unnoticed by the HCI community. It required motions to be specified manually but other than that, the idea was already there.

Recently, four (yes, four) research groups, including ours, have been working independently on this topic. We did not know about NTT-AT's system and each other's work. We were all trying to achieve a fully automatic support for video browsing by direct manipulation, with technically different approaches but also striking similarities in the thought process. - Aviz