Interesting brainstorming session last night with members of my Multimedia Information class, as we tried to come up with ideas for our final project. The conversation ranged from video cookbooks to machinima to photographic scavenger hunts to cellphone RPGs to video mashups to fanfilms to p2p tv, with lots of interesting digressions inbeteween. I think I’m leaning toward the video cookbook idea myself–it seems to have the right combination of interesting yet doable. Basically the idea is to build an archive of cooking shows, parse them into segments that correspond to recipe steps, and build an interface for searching by ingredient, technique, etc. This might also enable the recombination of segments to create instructional videos for new recipes. Existing research indicates that parsing video content (like cooking shows) with the aid of related textual content (like recipes) is possible. Plus it might give me a chance to finally play with a Tivo, since that seems like a logical way to get some content…