Waken: Reverse Engineering Usage Information and Interface Structure from Software Videos

AbstractWe explore the possibilities and opportunities related to reverse engineering usage information from screen-captured application video tutorials. We develop an application-independent system that recognizes UI components and activities, such as cursor movements and icon clicks, from an input set of video tutorials, We then present Waken, an enhanced video player, which showcases some of the design opportunities the are introduced by having this additional meta-data. In particular, users can directly interact with UI components in the video, such as icons and menus, to display associated information, or navigate to relevant moments in other videos. Initial results suggest that the system can successfully reconstruct many aspects of a UI without any prior application-dependent knowledge.