The Bridge in Between

Multimedia is great, but how come people did not

talk about it all these years? Why do people talk of multimedia as a 'nineties

technology'? Why are Internet/World Wide Web and multimedia showing up 'hand-in-glove'

most of the time? Has multimedia anything to do with Graphical User Interfaces (GUI)? Why

is the Wintelco (Microsoft through Windows, Intel through MMX enabled Pentium, and Cisco

through its routers to multimedia networking) combination putting their bets on

multimedia?

The answer to many of these questions lies

in the unfolding of many of the key technologies, their maturity, and standardization.

These enabling technologies bridge the gap between end-users and the exciting multimedia

computers. We will briefly provide a perspective view on some of the technologies.

While multimedia is exciting, it is

demanding too. The complex data types that multimedia can handle-text, graphics, audio,

video, and animation are easy to store, transmit, and manipulate today, yet difficult to

abstract.

The file sizes associated with multimedia

elements are significantly large. A rough account of the size increase can be gauged by

the fact that a page of type text will be 1000 times small compared to a scanned image of

the same size.

An audio file of few hours will be thousand

times larger than a page of scanned image. A digital video file of couple of hours, yet

again, will be 1000 times larger than an audio file of similar size.

Naturally, such

'thousands-of-folds-of-size-increase' pose tremendous challenges to processor performance,

storage devices, network speed, graphics performance, video display devices, and

programming tools such as operating systems, compilers, database management systems, and

interfaces.

It is a tribute to the IT professionals

that their research has unleashed a plethora of technologies that literally school-going

children (including the handicapped children) can handle multimedia today. Isn't it

amazing?

Probably the technology that 'delivered'

multimedia is the Compact Discs (CDs). With a 'large' storage capacity of 650 MB, an

inexpensive production process that could drive costs to sub-dollar levels and the

'read-only' feature enabling less risk of the end-user 'messing up' the content, CD ROM

was the first true 'enabler' of multimedia. Playing second fiddle to its audio counterpart

in mid eighties, CD ROM has truly evolved over the years from its humble beginning.

Starting with speeds of 360 KB/Sec of data

transfer, CD ROM technology has moved to 2X, 4X, 8X, 12X, 16X and the recent 24X CD

Drives, transferring data as many times fast as the number before the X! The early CDs

were great for graphics, particularly the Photo CDs and the multi-session CDs pioneered by

Kodak. With the arrival of high-speed CDs it was easy to pack a lot of audio (and tons of

'real audio') on a CD.

Packing video into CD has always been a

problem, though Video CDs have been around for a while now. The early generation CD ROMs

needed SCSI controller pushing up the costs. The arrival of CD ROM drives with IDE support

made it so affordable for desktop computers pushing the price to $ 100 range. Today, one

cannot think of multimedia without CD ROMsw. The Laser Disc that initially looked

promising took a backseat in the past few years.

1997 was indeed a watershed year with the

DVD drives appearing in the market at a very affordable price. With a capacity of several

gigabytes, today's DVD can provide 'full motion' MPEG quality video running into hours at

less than $ 450 for the drive and less than $ 20 for the media. An Indian movie on DVD

will be here shortly-globalization indeed for India!

The other pioneering development that

helped initial development in multimedia was the arrival of Microsoft Windows 3.x. Apple

Computers was a true visionary in multimedia with its legendary GUI, sound support,

QuickTime video, QuickTake camera etc. It was still a niche market. The Media Player of

Microsoft Windows 3.x coupled with the marketing muscle power of Microsoft took multimedia

to mainstream computing.

The introduction of Object Linking &

Embedding (OLE) provided a seamless way to integrate multimedia into every desktop

application-word processors, spreadsheets, databases, and presentation software. Microsoft

PowerPoint needs a special mention in this category. Microsoft took multimedia support to

new heights through its legendary Windows 95.

Engineering Workstations from Sun, HP, and

IBM always had phenomenal graphics performance. Multimedia for masses, pioneered by Wintel

(Microsoft Windows and Intel x86 processors), had to wait until 1996 to see affordable,

yet Advanced Graphics Processors (AGP) to get realistic graphics on their workstations. It

had to wait for the low-cost, high-performance Pentium processor, MMX technology and

low-cost, high-performance Digital Signal Processors (DSP) to support multimedia at the

hardware level and affordable high-resolution, large-screen monitors.

1997 will once again go in history as

watershed year, thanks to Intel MMX and HP's graphics technology. The recent developments

in 3D modeling, high-speed rendering, and photo-realistic animation have made morphing,

virtual reality 3D tours so common today. Even Indian advertisements like Kawasaki Bajaj,

Tamil movies, such as 'Avvai Shanmugi', use morphing extensively. 3D tours of the upcoming

real-estate projects are not uncommon in Bangalore.

The killer application of multimedia is

truly the graphical interface to the Internet/WWW provided by Mosaic in 1993. Quickly

followed by Netscape Navigator and the recent Internet Explorer from Microsoft, browsers

have completely changed the way users look at multimedia. In fact, today any application

designer must take into account the fact that multimedia is taken for granted by the

end-user. It is no longer an 'add-on'.

The Web has inspired a string of multimedia

technologies in the recent years. With a view to optimize network performance, CompuServe

pioneered the development of graphics file format, GIF that has become the de facto

standard for graphics files on the Net.

This, in turn, led to a number of standard

file formats for every type of multimedia-Joint Photography Expert Group (JPEG) for

high-quality graphics, WAV from Microsoft and RealAudio from RealAudio for sound files,

Motion Picture Expert Group (MPEG), standard AVI from Microsoft, QuickTime from Apple

(both for Apple and Windows), Special file formats for Animation (AutoDesk FLI/FLC),

Silicon Graphics initiated standard for Virtual Reality (VRML), Real audio & Real

video files, Macromedia Digital Movie files MOV etc.

A related development is the technology of

'plug-in' for multimedia that permits users to 'seamlessly' view multimedia in their Web

pages. As we approach the new millennium, more fundamental technology developments are

changing the very boundary of multimedia. The excitement of multimedia on the screen had

to be captured 'off-line' too. Inkjet printers, color laser printers are changing the way

people traditionally viewed printers as 'peripheral' to computing.

Suddenly printers have turned multimedia!

Yet they are so affordable, both in terms of initial investment and running costs. The

resolutions being talked about are 2400 dpi, leaps and bounds more than 160 (dots per

inch) dpi a couple of years back. Another peripheral, scanners have seen phenomenal

developments too. Scanner resolutions have increased from 150 dpi to 2400 dpi.

Today's scanners scan colors so well and so

many of them, 'multiples of millions' is a default choice in most HP Scanners! What pushes

many of them into back-bench is the evolution of digital camera. Digital camera replaces

photo-chemistry based photography into opto-electronics based digital photography. The

mess of silver iodide and films are gone. Today's digital cameras are so convenient, that

you 'point and shoot' the 'scene of action' and store them on a floppy disk of the camera.

At a convenient time, you download the

image onto your PC, view the images, and print them on your PC printer. No need to go to

the Photography shop. In fact, you can send the image as an attachment to your mom and dad

using standard email, thanks to Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension (MIME).

You can edit your images too! You become

not only the photographer, but also an expert who can 'touch up' the image, though

digitally. This development threatens the traditional photography industry. By the turn of

the century, IT majors like HP and Canon may be selling more cameras than camera-makers

Kodak and Polaroid! This is true industry shift!

Another major gadget that is likely to be

threatened is the conventional TV, with the onset of a new generation of Information

Appliances. Multimedia enables Interactive TV a possibility today, though costs are not in

its favour as of today. The upcoming High Definition Television (HDTV) is closer to a PC

than to traditional television. With appliances like WebTV entering the market, there is

another shift in industry.

Multimedia is enlarging its scope to

include not just computing but entertainment (camera, TV, tape recorder, telephone, fax

etc.) also, that a truly integrated Information Appliance is emerging.

These developments in technology have

implications in the software front too. The development environments have seen multimedia

influencing the Integrated Development Environment. Use of color to signify different

kinds of errors, use of audio alarms to indicate severe errors are routinely done. Even

wordprocessors use color imaginatively to prompt users about spelling and grammatical

errors.

High-end software such as SAP R/3 use

colors to implement thresholds, warnings and 'early watch' alarms to end-users. User

interfaces of most software like email clients use graphics and sound very subtly. At

deeper level, multimedia poses special challenges to compilers, operating systems, and

Database Management Systems (DBMS). Tomorrow's DBMS software should address the

complexities of very large databases (terabytes) to handle applications like

Video-on-Demand and Digital Library.

Still deeper are issues like

'Query-by-image-content'. Imagine a police officer using multimedia to help him screen

thousands of images from a multimedia database to locate a possible criminal. Such

applications are relevant even in the Indian context. Voter identity cards would have to

be administered year after year. Since people are likely to move to different places and

even misplace or lose their cards, we need a mechanism to quickly re-issue these cards. It

would call for storing a billion image files. The added complexity of moving selected

images over the network during election times will push us to limits of technology today.

So multimedia database represents an exciting application area.

A common thread among all multimedia

applications is the image editing and image compression. End-users appreciate the

complexity involved in editing text files such as 'cut and paste', 'search and

substitute', 'insert and delete'. They have their counterparts in graphics, audio and

video images too. Image editing in video files would translate to 'special effects' &

'post production', very demanding, and truly 'high-end' cinematography applications.

Software tools like Avid Tool, Macromedia

Director represent state-of-the-art technology in this area. Image editing in visual

images would correspond to 'pre-press' in print world, once again a very demanding

application. Image compression has evolved considerably over the years. But for the

significant developments in this area, much of contemporary multimedia work would be

impossible.

Casual users may be more familiar with

'non-lossy' compression schemes like Huffman coding used to compress program files, the

classic PKWare products (PKzip & PKunzip). Such compression schemes lead to

compression of 50 percent to 300 percent, whereas multimedia area has evolved compression

schemes with compression in the range of up to 100, 200 times! Generally such schemes are

'lossy compression' where a few bits of loss of information is permitted.

Multimedia images like photographs, music

and video have sufficient redundancy. Invariably the output of multimedia is processed by

an intelligent human being, who is capable of making out these losses and even 'make up'

for them. Several innovative schemes in audio and video compression include inter-frame

and intra-frame compression to get superior performance. Many of these developments,

particularly in the last few years have led to breathtaking performance improvements.

Adobe tools such as Persuasion, Publish, Photo-deluxe represent another set of

technology-intensive products.

Tools such as Macromedia Authorware,

Director, Asymetrix Toolbook and Web publishing tools like Microsoft FrontPage, Adobe

Pagemill and Sitemill provide authoring tools for multimedia. These authoring tools are

evolving too. A whole array of authoring tools to suit different user segments, themes,

metaphors etc. are available today.

To conclude, several technology

developments in multimedia area have contributed to its spectacular growth in products and

user acceptance of the products in the marketplace. This being a vast area, I have

outlined only some key issues only in this note.