lnnovations

Temporal

Unique Tools for Controlling Time & Exploring Motion

Products & Services

• FrameGlide™ video explorer software
• Spin Browser™ dial hardware
• Sales & rentals
• Custom software & hardware
• Installation & support
• Pricing

FrameGlide video explorer software

Introduction

The FrameGlide video explorer is an industrial-strength software application, originally developed for continuous operation within public museum exhibits. In this context, it allows visitors to explore kinetic phenomena, ranging from birds in flight, to plants growing, to explosive demolition of buildings, to point-of-view landscape tours. Often, the user interface chosen for this context is our ultra-rugged Spin Browser dial.

Since its museum introduction, the system has also been used in the endoscopy suite as a clinical add-on and training tool, at trade shows to allow booth personnel to show prospects diverse company offerings, and at conferences to allow presenters fluid flexibility when responding to audience questions.

This site was created to introduce the technology to other areas, including research, surveillance, athletics coaching, etc., and to get feedback from those areas in terms of desired functionality. Below we discuss both features that exist and those upcoming - the latter developed incrementally in response to client needs and projects, as well as by Temporal Innovations independently. So if you don't immediately see your desired feature, please contact us; we would love to work together to enhance our environment and achieve your goals!

Core concepts

Several principles guide the FrameGlide application's design and ongoing evolution. These include:

• Treat video content as data to be explored, not a "produced" experience. (One immediate result of implementing an effective method for this, was that interactive exhibits based on our system went from museum's usual 1-5 minutes of content, to over 24 hours at 30ps - an increase by over a factor of 1000.)
• Focus on dynamic phenomena captured across frames, as opposed the static imagery within a given frame.
• Leverage humans' ability to perceive complex patterns and notice behaviors, by providing an environment with minimal barriers between the human user and the kinetics of the visual data. (This requirement requires, among other things, realtime, immediate responsiveness to user actions.)
• Allow temporal highlighting of image data based on internal image metrics (contrast, color, brightness, etc.), and metrics derived from a secondary data streams (audio, barometric pressure, heart rate, etc.)
• Make filtering so fast and easy to configure that dozens of hypotheses may be tested in a single afternoon - during a meeting even!

Phase I - Extreme liquidity of perusal

The application's first focus was on providing ultra-smooth movement through video (no visual distortion, and no temporal stutter), forward and back, fast and slow. This liquidity extends through arbitrary frame paths determined on the fly. The system remains superlative in this area, allowing the exploration of multiple time-synchronized channels of HD from stop frame to over 1,000,000 times normal rate, running on nothing more than a convention PC.

Phase II - Parallel Live capture

The next major enhancement was the addition of a live camera feed. The system can currently capture to both disk and RAM, at frame rates ranging from timelapse to over 500fps, across multiple HD cameras, with capture sets aggregated over years and terabytes in size (including dynamically pruned frame density as imagery ages) -all while allowing ultra-smooth parallel user review right up to the present moment.

Phase III - Diverse features desirable for exhibit applications

We then added many more features relevant to our museum clients such as:

• Sophisticated, client configurable relationship between dial motion and advance through video, including linear "gear ratio", threshold entry into exponential mode, speed caps to prevent users missing important sections, etc.
• Custom, client-configurable exposure algorithms designed specifically for timelapse capture, including innovative methods to remove luminosity flicker.
• Graphic and audio overlays whose appearance is cued to user dwell time in a particular area.
• Realtime deinterlacing.
• Realtime chroma and difference keying.
  

For a relatively complete feature list (we are never quite up to date as the system's functionality advances with every project) geared toward museum clients, please see our Features and Advantages PDF on TechnoFrolics site - in particular the Technical Features List in Appendix B.

The Present: Phase IV - Powerful research and analysis functionality, current and future

The FrameGlide application offers powerful, expandable, features for filtering image data that in our experience are unique - both regarding ease of use, and equally or more importantly, how quickly such filtering can occur.

Regarding this latter point, once metric files are available, applying frame filters (reversibly) based upon boolean combinations of metrics typically takes just seconds for Gigabyte size video files, and just minutes for terabyte-size captures. We contrast this with using more conventional means to achieve the same goal, where the direct user effort would typically be measured in hours to days, and the computer rendering time (assuming conventional hardware) typically in days to weeks.
(Creating the metric files initially will take essentially no time if they already exist - for example wind speed data from NOAA. If exporting from the video data itself - for example frame brightness - then the time to export will be affected by image capture file size, and complexity of metric calculation. Once exported, playing with hypotheses can then iteratively occur at high speed.)

The kinds of things the FrameGlide system makes quick and easy include:

• Observing cloud formations only at negative peaks in the derivative of the barometric pressure, only at times when the wind speed exceeds 10 knots, and then only when both conditions are true.
• Watching a week's worth of classroom behavior only at times when the accompanying audio volume is 200% greater than the norm, and then only in the two minutes prior to such outbursts, and then in the 4 minutes following.
• Removing all but the explosive flashes in hours of nighttime ballistic test footage.
• Showing only the blue cars in a 24 hours of traffic video, then only the red ones, and then both.
• Comparing thousands of instances where a robot arm puts a bottle cap on a bottle, first at the contact point, then 10ms before, then 10ms after, then only just prior to stoppages of the assembly line due to alignment problems.
• Removing all stationary sections from a night's worth of human subject sleep video.

There are many ways to think about the FrameGlide environment. One useful way is as "virtual strobe light", but where unlike a normal strobe, the times between flashes can be measured in days as well as milliseconds (and thus can be used to see repetitive motions too slow to be seen with the naked eye), can be uneven in time, and can be keyed to external or within-image metrics.

Spin Browser dial hardware

We offer both dome mount and panel mount stainless steel Spin Browser dial navigators, with both USB (convenient) and RS232 serial (static resistant) interfaces. These user interfaces significantly enhance the user experience when navigating through large amounts of content. They are ultra-rugged (coming out of TechnoFrolics work in the interactive museum exhibit world), and come with a 5 year parts and labor warranty.

Sales & rentals

All our technologies are available for both purchase and rental.

Additionally, we plan to partner with researchers (perhaps you?) already having data sets of interest - e.g., 100 hours of bird behavior video with accompanying audio of chirps, tornado captures with accompanying wind speed measurements, etc. - in order to provide complete packages containing both data and analysis tools.

Custom software & hardware

We offer both software and hardware development services.

In the software arena, this might include developing custom metrics, creating support for new file types, or adding additional system functionality.

In the hardware arena, this might mean triggering capture based on project-specific sensors, integrating with novel user interfaces, capturing metric data from external sensors on the fly, etc.

Installation & support

We are available to help with installation, perform initial system configuration work, offer training for you and/or your staff, etc.

Pricing

Costs for industrial systems in quantity one typically vary between $5000 and $35,000, depending on details such as length and resolution of video data set to be explored, feature set used, amount of custom work required, what hardware elements Temporal Innovations is asked to supply, level of post-sale support and training desired, etc.

Please contact us with your requirements for a specific quote.