Portfolio: MERL — Highlights viewer for sports programming

Mitsubishi Electric Research Lab (MERL) is an R&D group for Mitsubishi Electric Corp. They developed a prototype that analyzes recorded sports programming and identifies highlights based on various aspects of the audio track.

This allows the user to watch just the highlights of a program, leaving out all those annoying parts where the batter steps away from the plate, then the pitcher steps off the rubber, then someone else calls time...

We tested different ways to move between highlights, some under viewer control while others were automatic. All were useful. Here's an example of the TV screen in a manual mode:

Sample screen with annotations

An example of what the user sees while navigating highlights. The graph can be turned off and the video can skip from one highlight to another automatically.

See other work for MERL.

Results of the study

It was a fascinating study for a number of reasons:

Consumers liked the idea a lot. One participant said, "I can watch this game in 20 minutes at this level and get everything I wanted to see."

It's hard to identify highlights, but it's not terrible to be wrong. MERL was still developing the method for selecting highlights when we did the study. But people weren't too upset when highlights were off by a bit, because it was easy to recover and they enjoy watching sports programs.

As always, uses want more. After seeing how the system worked, test participants wanted even more functionality to make it easier to skip around and see just the parts they wanted. MERL staff got some new ideas for features to consider.

Back to previous page