On Developing Tangible Interfaces for Video Streaming Control: a Real Case Study

This paper presents a novel tangible user interface for the dynamic control and manipulation of multiple video streams. Streams can be activated, triggered and managed based on the physical use of markers attached to cubes on a table top, whose movement is recognized by a camera placed on top of the working area. Markers can be associated to a single video stream, as well as a group of streams. Videostreams can be played out, paused, stopped, put in foreground, maximized or minimized, thanks to the use of our tangible interface; audio volumes of different streams can be controlled. Needless to say, streams can be distributed at different servers, or dynamically generated at distributed nodes in real-time. We claim that such an interface results as quite intuitive and easy-to-use, and can be employed in several videostreaming-based application domains, such as tele-conferencing, video-on-demand, video mixing. Results coming from an experimental assessment confirm the viability of our approach.