March 14, 2008 Asterpix has released new technology that automatically tags any internet video with interactive hotspots allowing users to see notes, links to more information and other videos on related topics. The new system build on the company's web-based service that enabled users to create interactive videos - with Asterbot, the work is done for you.
Asterbot works using a combination of video, text and link analysis to scan each video and find the most salient objects and mark them up with hotspots. Hotspots carry relevant tags, text and links and track the objects even as they move around.
The hotspots automatically created by Asterbot enable users to interact with objects of interest in a video to get more information relevant to the context. A pre-configured search query is also offered, allowing the user to search engine for additional information on the context of the hotspot. We've seen examples of interactive tagging for photos with products like Photobucket , however this technology is specifically related to online video content and is billed as the first in-video tagging available.
The process to marking up a video sees Asterbot follow five steps. Firstly it crawls the web to identify a suitable video, then ranks all the objects in the video in order of the attention they receive from the camera. Next Asterbot clusters text around the video such as the title, description and tags into topics, then ranks the topics in order of importance. The top ranked topic is then associated with the top ranked object, the second ranked topic with the second ranked object and so on. The final step is for Asterbot to assign links relevant to the associated topic for each object. An example can be seen on the Asterpix site.
Founded in October 2006, Asterpix is a web application and online video community facilitating the creation and sharing of interactive videos, or hypervideos. Interactive hotspots are available on all of the videos on Asterpix and the site supports PC and Mac, and major browsers – Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari - allowing users to convert or view any existing video as interactive video. Asterpix also has plans to make the technology available to partner sites in the near future.