iam is a research project to explore and catalogue user created point-of-view video. The creator is the director, editor and actor in his or her own personal movie. The point-of-view video allows the creator to review (and relive) his or her experiences directly from his or her vantage point.
The project takes a more extreme position than current vloggers (video bloggers) by focusing on longer, unedited movies, capturing as many uninterrupted hours as possible. (The system currently contains movies from October, 2004 to March 2005. It has over 100 different movie files and 150 hours of footage.)
Brochure [pdf]
The iam web interface is made up of several components, each helping you drill-down to the moment you want to watch.
1. The first piece is the calendar. This appears in the top left of the web page and automatically loads to the most current day with video in the system. Only days with content are "linkable" and the arrows at the top of the calendar allow you to jump from month to month.
Clicking on a day in the calendar will load the weekly timeline, right next to the calendar. This is a simple block representation of the calendar week. Each day is a block of grey. Movies show up as red stripes on the timeline, showing you when they occured both within the week and the day.
2. Clicking on any of the red stripes will load that movie. If the block is large, it means the movie is long and might take a while to load. (The largest movies on the server are about 150 megs, so make sure you are outfitted with a nice, fast pipe. Thats for a movie that is over 2 hours though, so you do get a reward for your patience.)
Frames from the movie will load first, in the movie specific timeline, along the bottom of the page. There is an image for each minute of the movie, with a larger image every 5 minutes and 60 images across a row. This makes it easy to see just how long the movie you are viewing is.
In the middle of the page is the space for the preview and movie panes.
Mousing over any of those thumbnails at the bottom will cause the image to appear in the preview pane in the middle left. This lets you scan the timeline quickly and see a fullsize version of the frame.
3. Clicking on any of these thumbnail images will cause the movie to jump to that point (once it is loaded). Press play in the QuickTime controls and you have found the moment you wanted -- out of over 150 hours of footage. Not too shabby for three clicks.
4. If you find yourself with something to say about a particular moment, simply click the "comment" link underneath the movie player. The movie will pause and a comment window will open. Say what is on your mind and submit it. Comments show up on the main page as bullets under a particular thumbnail.
Enjoy watching several months of my life!
