Multimedia Computing: Myths And Reality

Take a computer, add a CD ROM drive and a

set of speakers, and you have multimedia. Right? Nothing could be farther from the truth!

According to conventional definition, multimedia is made up of five components: text,

sound, graphics, animation, and video. Like all things conventional, this definition too

has undergone much corruption. Today, multimedia is commonly identified as a CD ROM drive,

(probably) a sound card, and a set of speakers, attached to a computer. By extension, CD

ROMs of all types are classified as multimedia.

alt="Please wait for pix" align="right" hspace="0" width="283" height="216">The real world

of multimedia extends far beyond CD ROMs and speakers. To understand the true implications

of multimedia computing, it is necessary for us to first understand its evolution. But

before that, let us pause for a moment to take a brief look at a very interesting

subject--human communication. Communication, no doubt, is the essence of all our

interactions. Whether it be a formal presentation or just a handshake, we are always

communicating emotions and ideas to others. By nature, communication is multidimensional,

and the more the number of dimensions involved in a communication, the richer it is, and

the more impact it makes. Thus, we use sound, color, action, tone, texture, and a wide

range of emotions in understanding what others, and our environment is communicating to

us, and in our communication with others. Even when confined to media that places severe

limits to the number of dimensions available, we tend to innovate, by adding virtual

dimensions. Thus, with something as bland and unemotional as email, we started adding

emotions to add a new dimension of emotions to bland text! In short, our endeavor has

always been to increase available dimensions of interaction. Be it in making business

presentations or in sending and receiving email, a computer today is a vital tool of

communication. Thus, it may not be too much off the mark to draw a parallel between the

communication process outlined above and computing. At its basest dimension, computing is

a series of interactions between man and machine. In the good old days, we had monochrome

text terminals with keyboards for input. Not much of interaction there! Our understanding

of communication tells us that human endeavor would be to increase the dimensions of this

interaction. Soon we had color monitors, graphical desktops, the mouse, and sound added.

Powerful processors made it possible to have animation and video possible on the computer

desktop. The enormous sizes of media-rich files pioneered the use of large-capacity,

portable storage devices, particularly the CD ROM. It is altogether a different matter

that the large-scale success of the CD ROM has been due to its use for software

distribution. The search for more dimensions of interaction did not end there. The

two-dimensional world of the monitor slowly got converted into a three-dimensional

playground. One of the early applications of 3D has been virtual walkthroughs--the

simulation of 3D space, particularly for CAD and architecture. But the real drivers of 3D

have been games, particularly the aim and shoot genre of games like Doom and Hexen.

Another area where games played a major role is in the development of control devices like

joysticks and game pads. Soon you had paddles, steering wheels, and many more peripherals

that gave a more realistic feel to game play. From this to virtual reality was but a small

step. The data glove and the VR goggle are perhaps the most easily recognizable of virtual

reality tools. The height of multimedia experience today is with immersive virtual reality

systems, wherein the virtual world surrounds you, and you interact with it, as you would

in real life. You open doors in this virtual world, as you would in real life, and you

walk through rooms in the same way. The computing power required for this is as yet

confined to heavy-duty servers, but the day is not too far, when the ubiquitous desktop

would have the processing power to create virtual worlds. And then, like the speakers and

CD ROM drives of today, VR equipment like data gloves and helmets would be part of the

standard 'multimedia computer'! In fact, they could even replace currently existing

peripherals like the mouse!So much for the hardware. Let us take a look at the software.

When you say multimedia, the user invariably thinks of CD ROMs while the developer's

thoughts, more or less, turn to MacroMedia's Director, the big daddy of multimedia

development tools. In fact, the term multimedia is so indelibly tied up with these two

that many otherwise useless pieces of software gain the garb of respectability by being

authored on Director and being put on a CD ROM to be called multimedia. On the flip side,

many shirk away from adding multimedia content to their packages and presentations,

assuming it to be a laborious and highly skilled task, requiring the services of

highly-paid programmers. Nothing could be farther from truth! Today, the driving force

behind multimedia content is neither the skills of the software programmer nor the medium

or the software on which the content is created. The two biggest drivers of multimedia are

games and the Internet. In their endeavor to deliver the latest in excitement to avid

gamers, game and associated hardware developers are for ever tuning their wares, adding

more and more dimensions of interaction between the player and the game. From more and

more realistic rendering of the game environment to tactile feedback on joysticks the list

of improvements is long.But, it is definitely the Internet that has taken multimedia

content development out of the hands of the programmers and put in the hands of the

designer--both the expert and the novice. The millions of personal homepages, alive with

animated graphics, tantalizing music, and even three-dimensional effects and video are

living proof of this simple but stunning fact. Surely, not all of them are accomplished

programmers. Most of them have probably used nothing more than an HTML authoring package

to achieve all this.

Not only that, the Internet has pioneered

many technologies for making multimedia leaner. Streaming audio and video, VRML, and

Quicktime VR. They make it possible to deliver multimedia content from across the globe to

your desktop, using a 28.8 Kbps, or even a 14.4 Kbps modem! All these together have

rewritten the rules of multimedia. Today, your creation is no longer judged by its

programing intricacies or by whether you developed it in Director or in C++. The intricate

effects that an accomplished programmer can create after days of toil with a highly

complex programing environment can easily be duplicated by a novice working with nothing

more than a freely downloaded HTML editor. What has become important in this situation is

the content. And what will separate the wheat from the chaff is the quality of content and

its presentation.