Today Gabriel and I brainstormed on how a popcorn-enabled version of the GML Drumbeat Festival Video could look. We came up with the below mockup in about 30 minutes. Main features: timeline displays events and triggers text-based resources and links which scroll in sync with the timeline. Gabriel showed me this documentary as an example. I really like the text-approach as a way to add context without removing attention from the main video. The GML viewer displays gml files referenced visually in the video and links back to 000000book.com, the database containing GML tags. Departing from this great popcorn mashup, our priority was to reduce visual flutter and assist the video without removing focus unneccesarily. The GML player will require some tweaking, as will the timeline and text-based ressources.

Another idea was to display the b-roll in a secondary window (Paul Rouget thought this could be interesting). We could still use the GML viewer window for this so that GML tags show when relevant. They will also be referenced and linked to in the ressource window. I for one have no idea how much of this is easy to pull off technically – for b-roll to be referenced in a single video file, HTML <video> would need to be able to handle tracks. We looked into this, but weren’t sure this is in the spec at this point. Anyone interested in working on this demo, please get in touch – there is a high likelihood we hack it on the march 26th Buttercamp in NYC. Gabriel is currently finishing editing the full-length video which will be done by that time. Very excited!