| Current visual design of electronic programming guides provides users with a linear and 'flat' browsing experience wherein it is impossible to fully appreciate the breadth and depth of the media selection before them. The Media Affinity Browser is a UI for entertainment computing which allows users to sift through massive amounts of digital metadata by engaging in a non-linear visual methodology. This approach attempts to address the issue of 'ease of access' to a digital media (base) of increasing complexity and volume. In a culture where visual (and other) media and their associated media types have reached critical mass, there is a need to create a visual, metadata driven UI that can identify desired media. Because user 'desire' is often ill defined, the MAB's core visual search methodology attempts to bridge the gap between what the user knows and what 'remains-to-be-seen' by a process of affinitive juxtaposition, or 'Visual Affinity Mixing' (VAM). The reflexive illustration of user relationships to media through time may have significant bearing on the user decision making processes regarding media. Making a visual connection to the timeline of media decision making re-engages the users periodic memory of context: emotion, time, relationship to other periodic elements; in short, re-constituting a moment in which it is possible to think about the present tense (and choice) as it is influenced by past contextual frameworks. The key is in representing that flow within an intuitively visual UI, incorporating center/periphery and scale/resolution motifs. |
