The multimedia technology is the use or presentation of data in two or more forms. The combination of audio and video in television was probably the first multimedia application but it was the advent of the personal computer, with its capacity to manipulate data from different sources and offer this directly to the consumer or subscriber, that has sparked the current interest.
With the newer generation of higher-speed CD-ROMs and faster processors entering the market every day, multimedia technology remains an active and exciting field. An emerging technology in interactive multimedia is effective human/machine interaction. Stereo vision, talker verification, speech synthesis, tactile interaction, and integration of multiple sensor modalities are active research areas to expand the present capabilities for human/machine interaction.
A potentially huge application of multimedia technology is in the inexpensive delivery of education materials developed by integrating multimedia data to geographically-distant students. This approach is the key to distance learning and training employees. Several of the technology solutions for audiovisual teleconferencing carry over to the application of distance learning.
Multimedia database systems are a new generation of database systems that will provide a unified and interactive framework for users to request and integrate information stored in a variety of media via high-speed networks. Multimedia Authoring Systems (MAS) are high-level systems providing unified environments for creating multimedia applications. MAS let researchers build their multimedia systems with great ease and, in addition, they increase the probability of the resulting systems.
3 February 2002