CHI Conference is a rather prestigious HCI meet which is held yearly, in a number of fabulous locations. This year Toronto – next year, Seoul! But seeing as I can’t be there this time around I’m helping some friends (Messrs Craggs and Scott) with their submission video.

Somebody said when I started my course that the ability to draw would be very useful – for other people. One fellow sketcher said she’d kept quiet about her skills – for this very reason. However – not only is it a good chance to earn some bacon points (this is when you work for food and kudos, and not monetary gain), it’s a great way of learning about other people’s research.

Thumbreels is a great way of showing you what content is in a video before you watch it. Like the gif sequences of old in rather frenetic website, they flick through image frames from the film sequence – but here is the clever part: it shows you the relevant stuff. You see, if you search for a story on magical robots and the thumbnail you see is a picture of a jam jar you’d be forgiven in thinking it was not the droids you were looking for.

Thumbreels relies on crowdsourced tags to choose the relevant frames, then presents them in rotation. The example in the video is about apple juice – turns out there just might have been arsenic in it.