I had the same observation with the opposite interpretation.  I was dissatisfied with the conversation afterwards, and I wished that we could have gone through the bookmarks one by one, heard what the person had to say, and then talked about it.

In general, I often find free-for-all discussions of this sort to be unfocused, unproductive, and unmemorable.  In the same way that we've been prototyping different ways of watching video, I've wanted to experiment with forms of discussion that are more structured, mediated, or deliberately augmented in some way.  Of course, this requires participants that are willing and comfortable playing along with an activity that might feel overly formal or artificial at first.  That's an awkward proposal, which is why I haven't proposed it.  Still, talking is the first "medium", and as a media laboratory, I think we ought to be experimenting with conversational protocols and tools, instead of always regressing to "everyone just shouts out whatever comes to mind".

One of the things I've learned from doing improv is the benefit of an imposed structure, a game, with its rhythms, restrictions, and goals.  (Another thing I've learned is that many people are very uncomfortable with this.)

On Sep 23, 2015, at 3:41 PM, Robert M Ochshorn wrote:

Yay collaboration!

I made an observation to Götz that I think is worth repeating here about the utility/efficacy of this prototype, re: coming back to moments we bookmarked. It was cool to come back to a few moments, or even just to pull up the slides, but we didn’t really depend on it so much for our conversation. My theory is that the value of our physical/virtual viewing map would increase as more time passes from the initial viewing. There are so many challenges before this truly functions as we envision (see: “Tabs from Matt”), but I would love to be able to refer to bits of this talk months from now in conversation.

RMO

On Sep 23, 2015, at 12:33 PM, Glen Chiacchieri wrote:

BLUE THUMBNAIL TOWER. Maybe next time I can choose a better quality  video (not blue), and better graphic design for the navigation/bookmarking/whatevering. Considering we decided to make this experiment like an hour before we were supposed to watch the movie, I think it turned out okay!

Also the collaboration worked pretty well! I was comfortable screenshotting all the slides and knew that I didn't have to worry as much about the dynamic parts of the lasering/navigation system because Bret was thinking about that. By the time I printed out all the slides, I was kind of exhausted, but Robert stepped in to help tape them all up.

On Wed, Sep 23, 2015 at 12:00 PM, Bret Victor wrote:

For watching this video, we put up a simple thumbnail grid to the left of the screen, printing out each of the slides and taping it to the wall.  The grid was lit up by the projector, which made it stand out in an interesting way.

The black vertical bar is the playhead, which moves along as the video plays, and can be controlled with the laser to jump around in the video.  The video spends a different amount of time on each slide, so the playhead moves at different rates through the different slides.  I thought this worked well, and the speed of the playhead gave a subtle hint of how long the current slide would be.

The red bars are bookmarks.  At any time while watching, a viewer could laser the screen, and it would leave a bookmark at the current position, to remind the viewer of a point that they wanted to bring up during the discussion afterwards.  I liked that the act of bookmarking was visible to everyone, as opposed to simply typing a note on your personal laptop -- it felt useful and important to know that somebody found something noteworthy in what was just said.

Glen collected and printed the slide screenshots, Robert put them up, and I made them laserable.

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Video of playhead moving:  [IMG_8376.m4v]