Figure 5: Videoface Main Screen Click to enlarge

Physical Layout

Due to the expanding nature of this research project, the individual components of VideoFace have been laid out in a frame environment enclosed in a parenting window. Using this approach, extensions and changes to existing frames is localized to a frame, as opposed to the entire application, and additions can be made without changing existing features.

Use of Colors

While some of the visualization is made based on placement in the (x,y) plane of the screen, these two dimensions only allow for so much variation in laying out the graph. A third and entirely autonomous dimension that has been added to both graphs is Color. While the multidimensionally-scaled graph is only an approximation of the n-dimensional structure, we can use color-coded edge to display the true level of interaction between two given actors.

The implemented color spectrum contains colors and color transitions that reflect a reasonably easy to understand scheme. Altogether, 1275 distinct colors have been used, going from blue to purple to red to yellow to green to cyan. The colors in this scheme generally wander from darker colors to lighter colors, where darker colors (blue, purple) denote loose interactions and lighter colors (green, cyan) denote strong interactions between actors.

Sparse ActorSceneLocationGraph

Typically, the ActorSceneLocationGraph is a sparsely populated graph, since not every location is used in every scene, and not every actor appears in every scene. For those scene/location cells that show no interaction, ActorNodes are not painted at all. For all valid scene/location cells, all ActorNodes are painted, even if an actor does not appear in the given scene/location. The reason for including it anyway is to provide the user with some visual reference of nodes that corresponds to the summarized version of the ActorGraph.

Figure 6: Isolation Mode Click to enlarge

Isolation Mode

As an enhancement of the ActorSceneLocationGraph, a node isolation mode has been implemented to help in extracting/viewing certain interactions while hiding the others. To this end, the ActorGraph is used to select nodes that are to be isolated from the ActorSceneLocationGraph. Once a node has been selected, it is shown in only those scene/location cells, in which the actor interacted. Note that this method is the converse of what has been discussed in a previous design justification titled "Sparse ActorSceneLocationGraph". By definition of this approach, selecting only one actor from the graph does not reveal any node in the ActorSceneLocationGraph, because a node by itself has not interaction. Once a second, third, etc. node has been selected, both the nodes and the corresponding edges appear in selected cells of the ActorSceneLocationGraph.