On general video-sharing platforms like YouTube, comments are displayed independently of video playback. As viewers often read comments while watching a video, they may encounter ones referring to moments unrelated to the current scene, which can reveal spoilers and disrupt immersion. To address this problem, we present ComVi, a novel system that displays comments at contextually relevant moments, enabling viewers to see time-synchronized comments and video content together. We first map all comments to relevant video timestamps by computing audio-visual correlation, then construct the comment sequence through an optimization that considers temporal relevance, popularity (number of likes), and display duration for comfortable reading. In a user study, ComVi provided a significantly more engaging experience than conventional video interfaces (i.e., YouTube and Danmaku), with 71.9% of participants selecting ComVi as their most preferred interface.
@article{arxiv.2603.26173,
title = {ComVi: Context-Aware Optimized Comment Display in Video Playback},
author = {Minsun Kim and Dawon Lee and Junyong Noh},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.26173},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
To appear in Proceedings of the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2026)