Here’s an interesting report speculating that Google might actually be planning to make YouTube as a hosted gaming site. Sometime in February 19, 2009 Google applied for a patent which carries the title – “Web-Based System for Generation of Interactive Games Based on Digital Videos.” The patent application which was published earlier this month states that:
“the collaborative generation of interactive features for digital videos, and in particular to interactive video annotations enabling control of video playback locations and creations of interactive games.”
This seems like somehow games would be built atop videos that are being submitted to hosting sites such as YouTube.
So its either games will be created that hop in and out of popular videos or a place where people could upload source videos will be created. This will allow users to play out multiple video scenes and combine them to create a YouTube hosted online game.
If this is where this patent application is going through, then it will open up the possibility for anyone to create games using their video camera and a good video editing software.
So, what do you think, does this makes sense at all?
Here’s the part of the patent application explaining all these points:
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.
