Tutorials are one of the most fundamental means of conveying knowledge. In this paper, we present a suite of applications that allow users to combine different types of media captured from handheld, standalone, or wearable devices to create multimedia tutorials. We conducted a study comparing standalone (camera on tripod) versus wearable capture (Google Glass). The results show that tutorial authors have a slight preference for wearable capture devices, especially when recording activities involving larger objects.

Video content creators invest enormous effort creating work that is in turn typically viewed passively. However, learning tasks using video requires users not only to consume the content but also to engage, interact with, and repurpose it. Furthermore, to promote learning with video in domains where content creators are not necessarily videographers, it is important that capture tools facilitate creation of interactive content. In this paper, we describe some early experiments toward this goal. A literature review coupled with formative field studies led to a system design that can incorporate a broad set of video-creation and interaction styles.

Video tends to be imbalanced as a medium. Typically, content creators invest enormous effort creating work that is then watched passively. However, learning tasks require that users not only consume video but also engage, interact with, and repurpose content. Furthermore, to promote learning across domains where content creators are not necessarily videographers, it is important that capture tools facilitate creation of interactive content. In this paper, we describe some early experiments toward this goal. Specifically, we describe a needfinding study involving interviews with amateur video creators as well as our experience with an early prototype to support expository capture and access. Our findings led to a system redesign that can incorporate a broad set of video-creation and interaction styles.

Unlike text, copying and pasting parts of video documents is challenging. Yet, the huge amount of video documents now available in the form of how-to tutorials begs for simpler techniques that allow users to easily copy and paste fragments of video materials into new documents. We describe new direct video manipulation techniques that allow users to quickly copy and paste content from video documents such as how-to tutorials into a new document. While the video plays, users interact with the video canvas to select text regions, scrollable regions, slide sequences built up across many frames, or semantically meaningful regions such as dialog boxes. Instead of relying on the timeline to accurately select sub-parts of the video document, users navigate using familiar selection techniques such as mouse-wheel to scroll back and forward over a video region where content scrolls, double-clicks over rectangular regions to select them, or clicks and drags over textual regions of the video canvas to select them. We describe the video processing techniques that run in real-time in modern web browsers using HTML5 and JavaScript; and show how they help users quickly copy and paste video fragments into new documents, allowing them to efficiently reuse video documents for authoring or note-taking.

We describe direct video manipulation interactions applied to screen-based tutorials. In addition to using the video timeline, users of our system can quickly navigate into the video by mouse-wheel, double click over a rectangular region to zoom in and out, or drag a box over the video canvas to select text and scrub the video until the end of a text line even if not shown in the current frame. We describe the video processing techniques developed to implement these direct video manipulation techniques, and show how there are implemented to run in most modern web browsers using HTML5's CANVAS and Javascript.

The ways in which we come to know and share what we know with others are deeply entwined with the technologies that enable us to capture and share information. As face-to-face communication has been supplemented with ever-richer media––textual books, illustrations and photographs, audio, film and video, and more––the possibilities for knowledge transfer have only expanded. One of the latest trends to emerge amidst the growth of Internet sharing and pervasive mobile devices is the mass creation of online instructional videos. We are interested in exploring how smart phones shape this sort of mobile, rich media documentation and sharing.