Improvising camera control for capturing meeting activities using a floor plan

This paper describes camera control interfaces for capturing meetings and presentations into multimedia documents. While technologies are maturing to deliver multimedia documents over network, skilled human hands are still required to create the contents. We had dug into the problem and found that some portion of it derives from current camera control systems, which only provide interfaces for incremental navigations. Presets are provided for some systems to avoid cumbersome manipulations, but the difficulty to improvise controls remains untouched. We introduced an interface using floor plan for selecting an arbitrary area to be captured. We also conducted a study to compare our method with other two typical camera control interfaces. The results revealed that our method was significantly better than a typical joystick-metaphor interface. Although an interface with presets resulted superior for completing tasks in limited conditions, the participants judge the use of a floor plan to be equally good in respect to ease of camera navigation as they intended. They also indicated possible improvement for our interface to close in on the one with presets.