Multimedia and its Applications

Multimedia and its Applications

The rapid development and synthesis of communications, electronics and computer technology is emerging to create a new revolution in the world. Today, new technologies such as computers, telecommunications and electronics are touching all parts of our lives, from industry to government to education to recreation. This widespread interest in multimedia is largely based on the perception that computer control of digital multimedia provides a low-cost easy accessibility to multimedia information that so far has been limited to specialists and production houses with million dollar equipment budgets. At the same time, the convergence of multimedia technology with the telecommunications industry is creating is creating a situation where visually enriched communications such as home shopping distance learning, remote collaboration, interactive access to live and stored video sources have been made possible, making our lives a lot easier and connected.

The word Multimedia is derived of two words-Multi, meaning more than one and Media, meaning medium or mediation. Thus the multimedia can be simply understood as the use of two or more media for various purposes.

Multimedia is media and content that uses a combination of different content forms. The term can be used as a noun (a medium with multiple content forms) or as an adjective describing a medium as having multiple content forms. The term is used in contrast to media which use only rudimentary computer display such as text-only or traditional forms of printed or hand-produced material. Multimedia includes a combination of text, audio, still images, animation, video, or interactivity content forms. -Wikepedia

“Multimedia: An application requiring more than two trips to the car to operate.”-Interactive Multimedia Association

The concept behind multimedia dates back to over four decades to a series of visionary thinkers who foresaw the evolution of computers towards richer personalized devices that would become an extension of the individual. In 1945 Vannevar Bus, then the Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development in the U.S government, suggested that one of the future devices available for individuals would be a memex, “a device I which one stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it can be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.” The memex would additionally be an associative device, so that related items could be easily located. Today, the linking of associated data for easy access is called hypertext or hypermedia, when any type of media forms can be linked. It is the simultaneous use of data in different media forms (voice, videotext, animations, pictures etc.) that is called multimedia.

Multimedia may be broadly divided into sequential and non-sequential categories. Sequential content progresses often without any navigational control for the viewer such as a cinema presentation. Non-sequential uses interactivity to control progress as with a video game or self-paced computer based training.

Multimedia has a huge range of applications. Multimedia finds its application in various areas including, but not limited to, advertisements, art, education, entertainment, engineering, medicine, mathematics, business, scientific research and spatial temporal applications. In context of entertainment, growing interactivity and group participation facilitated by multimedia has given birth to Video on Demand, Interactive Cinema and Collaborative Computer Supported Games. Multimedia is heavily used in the entertainment industry, especially to develop special effects in movies and animations. Multimedia games are a popular pastime and are software programs available either as CD-ROMs or online. Home Shopping is another important application of multimedia and home shopping sites like harilo.com, muncha.com, amazon.com etc. have made shopping possible at the comfort of our homes. Multimedia applications in Health Care can be attributed to the development of telemedicine, robotic surgery, MRI etc. All these features have reduced the health costs, the travel costs and have made health service accessible and affordable. Creative industries use multimedia for a variety of purposes ranging from fine arts, to entertainment, to commercial art, to journalism, to media and software services provided for any of the industries.  In Education, multimedia is used to produce computer-based training courses (popularly called CBTs) and reference books like encyclopedia and almanacs. The English education in middle school in China is well invested and assisted with various multimedia equipments. Multimedia applications such as E-books, Distance Learning, Audio-visual learning etc. are getting popular in Nepal too, and we can find their increasing applications in educational institutions and elsewhere.  Multimedia teaching is more intuitive than old ways; teachers can simulate situations in real life. In many circumstances teachers don’t have to be there, students will learn by themselves in the class. More importantly, teachers will have more approaches to stimulating students’ passion of learning. In Journalism, reporters and correspondents can get their news stories and pictures published from any part of the world with the help of multimedia applications. The Geographical Information System (GIS) in another important application of multimedia which has been used successfully in areas like wildlife, conservation, town planning, construction etc.

With the increasing scope and application of multimedia in almost every sector of our life, we cannot remain unaware about the challenges ahead to develop ubiquitous multimedia systems. The major challenge lies in solving a gamut of technical problems which include higher performance networking of time-based media, news user interface paradigms and new tools for authoring and using multimedia information. The cooperation of information providers, system integrators, communications and computer companies and application developers are likewise essential to the direction of technology and the pace of its growth.