another gui for multimedia storage

A new one to add to the list of new graphical user interfaces that could manage our massed amounts of information. This one comes from the Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs. It’s a way to store and manipulate digital files.

In this video, we describe the design of Personal Digital Historian (PDH), an interactive system that facilitates face to face conversation and story sharing, using a digital tabletop user interface, where relevant images can be easily displayed and manipulated by everyone. The design of PDH focuses on providing the right tools and visualizations for the listeners of the story as well as the story sharers. Our goal is to provide a new digital content user interface and management system enabling face-to-face casual exploration and visualization of digital contents.

Most of the examples in the video are photos. But some are maps (i.e., scanned images of maps). Think of what could be done in terms of managing all softs of digital files, photos, audio, databases, text, etc. that have geographic locations. And I love the round display with the tools on the circumference.

BTW, this could not only be an excellent tool for historians, sociologists, and geographers but for urban planners, too. Think of all the data we have, in terms of slides, master plans, old coursework, interesting references, and photos. All of these could be categorized, discussed and recategorized. The GUI has great potential for scenario planning or futuring sessions or plain old planning meetings.

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