Dragging the thumb in a focused timeline allows the user to specify a location in the media stream with greater precision. This application searches over 17 hours of audio that contain thousands of events representing keyword locations, web page accesses, and slide accesses. Figure 1 was taken from this application. The events above the streams represent keyword locations and the events below represent web page and slide accesses. We intend to use this slider in many of our capture and access applications.
Space is an issue in any information visualization.
As this widget is part of a larger interface for viewing streams, we want the widget to take up as little space as possible. Currently, each individual timeline vertically takes up 50 pixels. Thus, as more focused timelines are created, more vertical space will be required. We are investigating user-controlled collapsing of the individual timelines, where the context is visible in just a few pixels but interaction is reduced. There are several other proposed expansions to this widget.