According to recent patents filed, Google may be looking to use video annotations as a basis for gaming. The patent covers using annotations and urls to link to a video, or specific time in a video. Imagine watching a video and you are given annotations for the characters actions. You select one action and are taken to another video for that scene to play out. Add in some special affects, change live action to animation and you have yourself a game.
A video may have associated with it one or more annotations, which modify the appearance and/or behavior of a video as it was originally submitted to an online video hosting site. Some examples of annotations are graphical text box annotations, which display text at certain locations and certain times of the video, and pause annotations, which halt playback of the video at a specified time within the video. Some annotations, e.g. a graphical annotation (such as a text box annotation) comprising a link to a particular portion of a target video, are associated with a time of the target video, which can be either the video with which the annotation is associated, or a separate video. Selecting such annotations causes playback of the target video to begin at the associated time. Such annotations can be used to construct interactive games using videos, such as a game in which clicking on different portions of a video leads to different outcomes.
Of course there can be wide range of uses for this that is beyond my mortal understanding. We will have to wait and see what Google will do but I am curious…have others been using annotations in this manner?