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Figure 7 shows the interface a user sees immediately after clicking the New Note button in the file browser. The default title of "Untitled Note" is highlighted for pending delete, and pressing enter or tab will give focus to the rich text editor. Since no videos are associated with a new file, the video playback controls are disabled or hidden, and a standard recording button is shown. In our planned design, a live view from the web cam would have been shown in the black box in Figure 7, and taking snapshots would have been allowed even without the recording of video.
Implementation
After deciding on the webcam-based design, we had to choose which platform we were going to use for our implementation. We all preferred a web app in terms of creating a user interface, but capturing webcam output from a web app proved challenging. We hoped to be able to use the HTML5 getUserMedia API to capture webcam output. However, this is a very new technology -- only in the latest version of Chrome, and only if you enable experimental features. We eventually realized that chrome's implementation didn't have all of the features we needed yet: most importantly the ability to save video, but also the ability to differentiate between webcams plugged in to a laptop to access a front-facing webcam pointing at a lecturer. In the end, we were not able to use getUserMedia to implement live webcam capture for SETENTS, and had to resort to using a pre-recorded video and pretending that the playing video corresponded to a camera live view. This is the implementation limitation that has the single largest impact on the usability of our project, since it can be somewhat confusing having to pretend that a pre-recorded video corresponds to what you're seeing during a user test. And of course, it means that the killer feature of our app is not useful in the real world.
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