Two frequent distractions from TV programmes, films, DVDs and so forth are naggingly half-recognised actors and coming in mid-series and not following, due to both one's own head contents and others communicating their own confusion or familiarity. This is an attempt at addressing this.

Tag each figure in a video with a description of their appearances and location on screen throughout the clip, presumably with some kind of vector way of describing them rather than a humungous stream of coordinates. Associate this tag with an IMDB search term and a database of plot points. Put two buttons on the remote or user interface, one of which gives the actor's name and an optional biography and appearances overlaid on the actor, the other of which, dependent on season, episode and point in the episode, gives the character's name and optional in-universe history up to that point in the episode. With each, one press gives the name, two more information and three switches the text off. The longer text scrolls up within the visible portion of the character/actor or can be shifted to side bars.
-- nineteenthly, Oct 23 2011

Actor_27s_20name_20subtitles [marked-for-deletion] redundant [hippo, Oct 24 2011]

Character_27s_20Previous_20Characters [marked-for-deletion] Doubly redundant! [DrBob, Oct 25 2011]

Automatic Celebrity Recogniser Automatic Celebrity Recogniser
Going for the Triple! [zen_tom, Oct 25 2011]

This smacks of augmented reality and media integration. As a huge SF fanboy, naturally I like it.
-- Alterother, Oct 23 2011


thanks 19 - you just reminded me that I wanted to google an actress.
-- po, Oct 23 2011


As long as the feature could be disengaged it gets my (+).
Otherwise it sounds a bit like Mtv's pop-up videos and ot being able to turn just the pop-ups off used to get on my nerves.
-- 2 fries shy of a happy meal, Oct 23 2011


Oh yes, it's definitely extremely optionable. The idea is, you think "didn't I see her in something else?", you press the button and the actor's name appears in their vicinity, probably with their most prominent appearance, and if your curiosity is still piqued, you press it again and it scrolls a list of other appearances past, then a third time dismisses it. The other button's the same, but harder to implement.

// Side-bars? //

Mhm! What i have in mind is a temporary letterbox format or academy aspect ratio shift which shows the text away from the screen which prevents clutter. It's an option, and again temporary.
-- nineteenthly, Oct 24 2011


I disagree that this is redundant because i've included a separate in-world feature and gone into more detail.
-- nineteenthly, Oct 24 2011


OK, that makes it triply half-redundant.
-- nineteenthly, Oct 25 2011


There is very evidently a need for this - there ought to be some aphorism that links the frequency of repeated ideas and their impending facility for success. I predict the iPhone7 will have this exact thing. Hold it up, let the camera scope the subject, and bof! there's the summarised material scraped from a series of publicly curated open-source databases. The same system could be worked for schools, sports-stadia, travel, and television - perhaps history lessons. On which tangent, this question - In the future, will children learn all their history by watching "as-it- happened" news footage?
-- zen_tom, Oct 25 2011



random, halfbakery