Asterpix: Tag Your Videos

Let me introduce you to Asterpix. This is one of the coolest video technologies I have seen in 2007. It has never failed to wow people when I demo it.

In essence, Asterpix is a web service that allows you to add some very powerful interactivity to your videos. You know how we like to hyperlink everything; we add links to text, to graphics, to banners and now we can add links IN videos. This may not sound very sexy, but if you know how links are done for videos traditionally, you would know how much of a time saver this is going to be. Normally, to add links, we either place them in the video as sub-titles or we drop them in the show notes by the side of the clip. Show notes are not very portable, when you copy the video or re-embed them on another site, you lose the show notes and the links are gone. And of course, you can’t sync your show note links with the video. The sub-title approach is a little more synced but you can’t click on them, not to mention the time required to add sub-titles in post-processing.

So, to show you how Asterpix does it, I have embedded a sample video here. Go ahead, play the video and hover your mouse over the blue glowing wifi logo on the t-shirt. I’ll show you how to create a tagged video later.

Notice how the player tracks the wifi logo through the rest of the video? You may also notice that I have tagged Chewy’s face as well. It is apparent that the technology has some form of pattern recognition that allows it to move with the tagged subject.

Of course, this begs the question on whether the pattern recognition is persistent. To test that I filmed 2 objects, a calculator and a Palm Treo and tagged them accordingly.

Notice how the player tracks the wifi logo through the rest of the video? You may also notice that I have tagged Chewy’s face as well. It is apparent that the technology has some form of pattern recognition that allows it to move with the tagged subject.

Of course, this begs the question on whether the pattern recognition is persistent. To test that I filmed 2 objects, a calculator and a Palm Treo and tagged them accordingly.

Notice that the recognition is lost once the subjects moved out of frame? (In case you are wondering, the calculator was tagged manually for its second appearance.) The player mistook the LCD monitor behind Chewy for the Treo in the later part of the clip.

Even though the test failed and it seems that the recognition wasn’t persistent, this is a very interesting technology nonetheless. This technology definitely has some real application. And the beauty of it is its simplicity. Let me show you now how you can tag just any video using Asterpix.

When you signed in and clicked on the “create your own” link, Asterpix allows you search for any videos. If you know the URL of a specific video on MSN Video or Youtube, simply enter it and you will be prompted to key in some meta-data. Click on “Go to add notes” and you are ready to tag.

Your video will load in the player and to tag an object, just click on it during playback.

You can drag and expand your selection box if needed. To add links or comments, just click on "maximize".

And that's it! Like I said, the service is really easy to use. If you already have your videos uploaded to one of the many online services, it will practically just take you a few minutes to tag and re-embed your videos to your blog or web sites.

Asterpix is currently a free service. You can download a beta version of their API here.