Multimedia applications

Reflecting the generic, or buzzword, nature of the term multimedia is the range of applications that claim to be multimedia. Existing and planned applications list such diverse target areas as electronic magazines, video--on-demand, patient monitoring systems in hospitals, remote robotic agents, distance learning, and interactive (WAN-)distributed virtual reality games. Using some rough categorizations we can sort multimedia applications into the following categories (this list is not exhaustive):

Information systems: All systems whose main purpose is to provide information to a user (or a group of users). Example application areas are :

(Remote) representation: Systems which represent a user at a remote location. The representation can be either passive or active---that is, the user can either just receive information about the remote location and the actions taking place there (passive representation), or she can take part in the action and even influence the process at the remote location (active representation). Notable example applications include:

conferencing applications: The user takes part in a conference; he/she can see and hear the other participants; usually some kind of tool for showing text and graphics to the other participants is available.

distance learning: Distance learning is essentially the same as conferencing; instead of transmitting a conference session or a group meeting, a seminar, a lecture, or a class is transmitted to students somewhere on the network.

remote auctions: a growing area which is and extension of online shopping

remote robotic agents: The remote location might be situated inside a hazardous environment (e.g., the core of a nuclear reactor, or a deep-sea exploration) which is too dangerous for the user as that she could be there in person, yet, the task which the user wants to carry out requires human intervention.

remote task agents: Taking the concept of remote robotic agents one step further we can employ a piece of software, an agent, to act on behalf of us: For example, the agent would travel across the Internet, visit a pre-determined set of machines, carry out the instruction that we programmed it to do, bundle up the results (which, of course, would be multimedia documents), and return to our workstation.

virtual reality:Whereas the conferencing and remote robotic agent applications represent the user at another, existing, location, to which she could travel to instead, virtual reality applications represent users inside a physically-nonexisting environment; for example, rather than accessing the records of a database through an arcane retrieval language, the database user might enter a virtual reality representation of the database, which would present individual records as old-fashioned folders.

Entertainment: This area attracts most of the attention of the general public as a lot of telecommunication and media companies expect that the entertainment market will be the one with the largest audience and, also, the market which is best suited for the employment of multimedia techniques. The following list presents just a short excerpt of the projects planned and worked on:

digital television: Originally, digital television started out as a technology to deliver television broadcasts that were to be of substantially higher quality and size than current, analog technology based broadcasting services (the term high-definition television (HDTV ) was coined to describe these new broadcasting services). However, the service providers that are implementing those services are already looking at other uses of the digital television technology: Data transmission, paging systems, wireless telephony, and multiple television programs within one channel are just a few of the uses in consideration, thereby pushing the original HDTV goal aside

video--on-demand: Cable companies want to distribute a customized program to each viewer---that is, the user instead of the cable company shall have the authority to decide what kind of program the cable company delivers; additionally, all the features which the user has come to know from her video-cassette--recorder shall also be available with video--on-demand

widely distributed interactive games: Companies like Sega or Nintendo are working on creating networks of game-boy machines, that will interconnect using the existing telephone network or future networks.

interactive television: This kind of application is especially attractive for television companies and multimedia "evangelists". The interactive part refers to the user's ability to partake in televised voting or game shows. The attractive aspect of interactive television stems from the fact, that the necessary technological infrastructure is already installed: Cable television and telephony services are available almost everywhere. Hence, startup-costs are low; set-top boxes link the television set, the telephone, and the user .

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