INTERACTIVE MULTIMEDIA

INTRODUCTION TO MULTIMEDIA
 History of Multimedia
 Definition of Multimedia
 Components of Multimedia
 Hypermedia and Multimedia
 Overview of Multimedia software Tools
 Introduction of Multimedia
So, what is "multimedia"? To start with...
•Multi = "many"
•Media = plural of "medium"
•Medium = a channel of communication
 So, with those definitions you have something like, "a means of communicating information using
multiple channels". In fact, the dictionary definition is, "using, involving, or encompassing several
media". This means that multimedia can be as simple as speaking and using your hands at the same time
for emphasis. It doesn't have to involve computers. It just has to involve more than one channel of
communicating your intent. The Internet is multimedia. Movies are multimedia. Books can be
multimedia if they contain text and pictures.
 Expanding on the definition above, for our purposes we can define multimedia as: The combined use of
several media -- such as text, graphics, audio, video, and animation -- in a single application for
educational or entertainment purposes.
 Definition of Multimedia
What is Multimedia?
Multimedia can have a many definitions these include:
Multimedia means that computer information can be represented through audio, video, and
animation in addition to traditional media (i.e., text, graphics drawings, images).
A good general definition is:
Multimedia is the field concerned with the computer-controlled integration of text, graphics,
drawings, still and moving images (Video), animation, audio, and any other media where every
type of information can be represented, stored, transmitted and processed digitally.
A Multimedia Application is an Application which uses a collection of multiple media sources
e.g. text, graphics, images, sound/audio, animation and/or video.
Hypermedia can be considered as one of the multimedia applications.
 History of Multimedia
 A brief history of the use of multimedia to communicate ideas might begin with newspapers , which
were perhaps the first mass communication medium, using text, graphics, and images.
 Motion pictures were originally conceived of in the 1830s to observe motion too rapid for perception by
the human eye. Thomas Alva Edison 'commissioned the invention of a motion picture camera in 1887.
Silent feature films appeared from 1910 to 1927; the silent era effectively ended with the release of The
Jazz Singer in 1927.
 Newspaper were perhaps the first mass communication medium to employ Multimedia they used mostly
text, graphics, and images.
 In 1895, Gugliemo Marconi sent his first wireless radio transmission at Pontecchio, Italy. A few years
later (in 1901) he detected radio waves beamed across the Atlantic. Initially invented for telegraph, radio
is now a major medium for audio broadcasting.
 Television was the new media for the 20th century. It brings the video and has since changed the world
of mass communications.
 History of Multimedia

A vintage dry-plate camera. E&H T Anthony model Champion, circa 1890

An Edison phonograph, model GEM. Note the patent plate in the bottom picture, which suggests that the importance of patents had long
been realized and also how serious Edison was in protecting his inventions. Despite the warnings in the plate, this particular phonograph
was modified by the original owner, a good DIYer 100 years ago, to include a more powerful spring motor from an Edison Standard
model and a large flower horn from the Tea Tray Company.
 History of Multimedia

Evolution of audio storage media. Left to right an Edison cylinder record, a flat vinyl record, a reel-to-reel magnetic tape, a cassette tape,
and a CD.
 History of Multimedia
Some of the important events in relation to Multimedia in Computing include:
•1945 - Bush wrote about Memex
•1967 - Negroponte formed the Architecture Machine Group at MIT
•1969 - Nelson & Van Dam hypertext editor at Brown
•Birth of The Internet
•1971 - Email
•1976 - Architecture Machine Group proposal to DARPA: Multiple Media
•1980 - Lippman & Mohl: Aspen Movie Map
•1983 - Backer: Electronic Book
•1985 - Negroponte, Wiesner: opened MIT Media Lab
•1989 - Tim Berners-Lee proposed the World Wide Web to CERN (European Council for Nuclear Research)
•1990 - K. Hooper Woolsey, Apple Multimedia Lab, 100 people, educ.
•1991 - Apple Multimedia Lab: Visual Almanac, Classroom MM Kiosk
•1992 - the first M-bone audio multicast on the Net
•1993 - U. Illinois National Center for Supercomputing Applications: NCSA Mosaic
•1994 - Jim Clark and Marc Andreesen: Netscape
•1995 - JAVA for platform-independent application development. Duke is the first applet.
•1996 - Microsoft, Internet Explorer.
 Characteristics of Multimedia
Characteristics of a Multimedia System
A Multimedia system has four basic characteristics:
•Multimedia systems must be computer controlled.
•Multimedia systems are integrated.
•The information they handle must be represented digitally.
•The interface to the final presentation of media is usually interactive.
 Component of Multimedia
The multiple modalities of text, audio, images, drawings, animation, video, and
interactivity in multimedia are put to use in ways as diverse as
 Geographically based, real-time augmented-reality, massively multiplayer online
video games, making use of any portable device such as smartphones, laptops, or
tablets, which function as GPS-aware mobile game consoles.
 A camera that suggests what would be the best type of next shot so as to adhere
to good technique guidelines for developing storyboards.
 A Web-based video editor that lets anyone create a new video by editing, annotating, and remixing
professional videos on the cloud.
 Cooperative education environments that allow schoolchildren to share a single educational game using
two mice at once that pass control back and forth.
 Searching (very) large video and image databases for target visual objects, using semantics of objects.
 Visual cues of video-conference participants, taking into account gaze direction and attention of
participants.
 Hypermedia and Multimedia
 Ted Nelson invented the term "HyperText" around 1965. Whereas we may think of
a book as a linear medium, basically meant to be read from beginning to end, a
hypertext system is meant to be read nonlinearly, by following links that point to
other parts of the document, or indeed to other documents.
 Hypermedia is not constrained to be text-based. It can include other media, such as
graphics, images, and especially the continuous media - sound and video.
Apparently Ted Nelson was also the first to use this term. The World Wide Web
www)is the best example of a hypermedia application.
 As we have seen, multimedia fundamentally means that computer information can
be represented through audio, graphics, images, video. and animation in addition to
traditional media (text and graphics). Hypermedia can be considered one particular
multimedia application.
 Hypermedia and Multimedia

Hypertext is nonlinear.
Examples of typical multimedia applications include: digital video editing and production systems; electronic
newspapers and magazines; the World Wide Web; online reference works, such as encyclopedias; games; groupware;
home shopping; interactive TV; multimedia courseware; video conferencing; video-an-demand; and interactive
movies.
 Multimedia software Tools
The categories of software tools we examine here are
Music sequencing and notation
Digital audio
Graphics and image editing
Video editing
Animation
Multimedia authoring.
 Multimedia software Tools
 Music sequencing and notation
Cakewalk Pro Audio
Cakewalk Pro Audio is a very straightforward music-notation program for “sequencing.” The term sequencer comes from older devices that
stored sequences of notes in the MIDI music language.
Finale, Sibelius
Finale and Sibelius are two composer-level notation systems; these programs likely set the bar for excellence, but their learning curve is fairly
steep.
 Digital Audio
Digital Audio tools deal with accessing and editing the actual sampled sounds that make up audio.
Adobe Audition
Adobe Audition (formerly Cool Edit) is a powerful, popular digital audio toolkit with capabilities (for PC users, at least) that emulate a
professional audio studio, including multitrack productions and sound file editing, along with digital signal
processing effects.
Sound Forge
Like Audition, Sound Forge is a sophisticated PC-based program for editing WAV files. Sound can be captured through the sound card, and then
mixed and edited. It also permits adding complex special effects.
Pro Tools
Pro Tools is a high-end integrated audio production and editing environment that runs on Macintosh computers as well as Windows. Pro Tools
offers easy MIDI creation and manipulation as well as powerful audio mixing, recording, and editing software.Full effects depend on
purchasing a dongle.
 Multimedia software Tools
 Graphics and Image Editing
Adobe Illustrator
Illustrator is a powerful publishing tool for creating and editing vector graphics, which can easily be exported to use on
the Web.
Adobe Photoshop
Photoshop is the standard in a tool for graphics, image processing, and image manipulation. Layers of images, graphics,
and text can be separately manipulated for maximum flexibility, and its set of filters permits creation of sophisticated
lighting effects.
Adobe Fireworks
Fireworks is software for making graphics specifically for the Web. It includes a bitmap editor, a vector graphics editor,
and a JavaScript generator for buttons and rollovers.
Adobe Freehand
Freehand is a text and web graphics editing tool that supports many bitmap formats, such as GIF, PNG, and JPEG. These
are pixel-based formats, in that each pixel is specified. It also supports vector-based formats, in which endpoints of lines
are specified instead of the pixels themselves, such as SWF (Adobe Flash). It can also read Photoshop format.
 Multimedia software Tools
 Video Editing
Adobe Premiere
Premiere is a simple, intuitive video editing tool for nonlinear editing—putting video clips into any order. Video and audio are arranged in
tracks, like a musical score. It provides a large number of video and audio tracks, superimpositions, and virtual clips. A large library of built-in
transitions, filters, and motions for clips allows easy creation of effective multimedia productions.
CyberLink Power Director
Power Director produced by CyberLink Corp. is by far the most popular nonlinear video editing software. It provides a rich selection of audio
and video features and special effects and is easy to use. It supports all modern video formats including AVCHD 2.0, 4K Ultra HD, and 3D
video. It supports 64-bit video processing, graphics card acceleration, and multiple CPUs. Its processing and preview are much faster than
Premiere. However, it is not as “programmable” as Premiere.
Adobe After Effects
After Effects is a powerful video editing tool that enables users to add and change existing movies with effects such as lighting, shadows, and
motion blurring. It also allows layers, as in Photoshop, to permit manipulating objects independently.
Final Cut Pro
Final Cut Pro is a video editing tool offered by Apple for the Macintosh platform. It allows the input of video and audio from numerous sources,
and provides a complete environment, from editing and color correction to the final output of a video file.
 Multimedia software Tools
 Animation
Multimedia APIs
Java3D is an API used by Java to construct and render 3D graphics, similar to the way Java Media Framework handles
media files. It provides a basic set of object primitives (cube, splines, etc.) upon which the developer can build scenes. It
is an abstraction layer built on top of OpenGL or DirectX (the user can select which), so the graphics are accelerated.
DirectX, a Windows API that supports video, images, audio, and 3D animation, is a common API used to develop
multimedia Windows applications such as computer games.
OpenGL was created in 1992 and is still a popular 3D API today. OpenGL is highly portable and will run on all popular
modern operating systems, such as UNIX, Linux, Windows, and Macintosh.
Animation Software
Autodesk 3ds Max (formerly 3D Studio Max) includes a number of high-end professional tools for character animation,
game development, and visual effects production. Models produced using this tool can be seen in several consumer
games,
such as for the Sony Play station.
Autodesk Softimage (previously called Softimage XSI) is a powerful modeling, animation, and rendering package for
animation and special effects in films and games.
Autodesk Maya, a competing product to Softimage, is a complete modeling package. It features a wide variety of
modeling and animation tools, such as to create realistic clothes and fur. Autodesk Maya runs on Windows, Mac OS, and
Linux.
 Multimedia software Tools
 GIF Animation Packages
For a much simpler approach to animation that also allows quick development of effective small animations for the Web, many
shareware and other programs permit creating animated GIF images. GIFs can contain several images, and looping through them
creates a simple animation. Linux also provides some simple animation tools, such as animate.
 Multimedia Authoring
Tools that provide the capability for creating a complete multimedia presentation, including interactive user control, are called
authoring programs.
Adobe Flash
Flash allows users to create interactive movies by using the score metaphor—a timeline arranged in parallel event sequences, much
like a musical score consisting of musical notes. Elements in the movie are called symbols in Flash. Symbols are added to a central
repository, called a library, and can be added to the movie’s timeline.
Once the symbols are present at a specific time, they appear on the Stage, which represents what the movie looks like at a certain
time, and can be manipulated and moved by the tools built into Flash. Finished Flash movies are commonly used to
show movies or games on the Web.
Adobe Director
Director uses a movie metaphor to create interactive presentations. This powerful program includes a built-in scripting language,
Lingo, that allows creation of complex interactive movies.3 The “cast” of characters in Director includes bitmapped sprites, scripts,
music, sounds, and palettes. Director can read many bitmapped file formats. The program itself allows a good deal of interactivity,
and Lingo, with its own debugger, allows more control, including control over external devices.
 Multimedia software Tools
Dreamweaver
Dreamweaver is a webpage authoring tool that allows users to produce multimedia
presentations without learning any HTML.
 Multimedia software Tools
ASSIGNMENT 1
1. Identify three novel applications of the Internet or multimedia applications. Discuss why you think these are
novel.
2. Briefly explain, in your own words, "Memex" and its role regarding hypertext. Could we carry out the Memex
task today? How do you use Memex ideas in your own work?
3.Your task is to think about the transmission of smell over the Internet. Suppose we have a smell sensor at one
location and wish to transmit the Aroma Vector (say) to a receiver to reproduce the same sensation. You are asked
to design such a system. List three key issues to consider and two applications of such a delivery system. Hint:
Think about medical applications.
4. Using your own words, describe what is “multimedia”? Is multimedia simply a collection of different types of
media?
5. Discuss the relation between multimedia and hypermedia.
6. Discover a current media input, storage, or playback device that is analog. Is it necessary to convert to digital?
What are the pros and cons to be analog or digital?
7.What are the challenges of multimedia systems.
8.Explain the Desirable Features for a Multimedia System.
 Multimedia software Tools
BOOK REFERENCEs
Fundamentals of Multimedia
Authors: Ze-Nian Li Mark S. Drew Jiangchuan Liu
Second Edition
Multimedia Computing
Authors: Ramesh Jain, Gerald Friedland
Originally published: July 28, 2014
Multimedia Communications
Author: Fred Halsall
Originally published: 2001