Foot-turistic multimedia: designing interactive multimedia installations for shoe shops

The amount of money spent in a store is positively correlated with the amount of time spent inside. We argue this is an opportunity for multimedia installations that can entertain shoppers and promote interaction with the shop??s products. This was the main principle behind our design idea for two interactive installations specifically conceived for shoe shops. We present two applications of interactive multimedia to shoe shopping: an interactive semantic mirror and an interactive window logo. We also describe the results of ethnographic studies, before and after the design process. Our contribution is two-fold: (i) we develop and apply a new multimedia architecture that combines RFID in-store technology with high-end motion detection algorithms, and (ii) we describe one of the first few studies about multimedia installations for improving the shoe shopping experience, in what we call ??foot-turistic?? interactions.     

From multimedia models to multimedia transport protocols

This paper presents a new protocol architecture for distributed multimedia systems which includes a new and general protocol layer for the transport of multimedia objects. The proposed protocols are based on the use of two extended timed and time Petri net models that specify the synchronisation requirements of multimedia applications. After presenting these two formal models, it is shown how they have been used to design the general multimedia architecture whose transport layer is based on the concept of a partial order connection, an extension of the classical connection oriented (e.g., TCP) and connectionless (e.g., UDP) transmission concepts.     

Talisman: multimedia for the PC

Talisman introduces a fresh approach to high-performance multimedia at PC prices. PC multimedia solutions have been limited by cost constraints in terms of available memory and bandwidth. This has kept users from rendering the kinds of images they have come to think of as the domain of high-end imaging workstations. Such high-end machines as SGI's Reality Engine often contain tens of megabytes of graphics memory and make use of multiple memory buses that are hundreds of bits wide. Using image caching and compression techniques that drastically reduce memory and bandwidth requirements, the Talisman architecture allows a high-end multimedia system to be built with just 4 Mbytes of memory     

Olfaction-enhanced multimedia: perspectives and challenges

Olfaction—or smell—is one of the last challenges which multimedia and multimodal applications have to conquer. Enhancing such applications with olfactory stimuli has the potential to create a more complex—and richer—user multimedia experience, by heightening the sense of reality and diversifying user interaction modalities. Nonetheless, olfaction-enhanced multimedia still remains a challenging research area. More recently, however, there have been initial signs of olfactory-enhanced applications in multimedia, with olfaction being used towards a variety of goals, including notification alerts, enhancing the sense of reality in immersive applications, and branding, to name but a few. However, as the goal of a multimedia application is to inform and/or entertain users, achieving quality olfaction-enhanced multimedia applications from the users’ perspective is vital to the success and continuity of these applications. Accordingly, in this paper we have focused on investigating the user perceived experience of olfaction-enhanced multimedia applications, with the aim of discovering the quality evaluation factors that are important from a user’s perspective of these applications, and consequently ensure the continued advancement and success of olfaction-enhanced multimedia applications.     

CGMP: cloud-assisted green multimedia processing

With continued advancements of mobile computing and communications, emerging novel multimedia services and applications have attracted lots of attention and been developed for mobile users, such as mobile social network, mobile cloud medical treatment, mobile cloud game. However, because of limited resources on mobile terminals, it is of great challenge to improve the energy efficiency of multimedia services. In this paper, we propose a cloud-assisted green multimedia processing architecture (CGMP) based on mobile cloud computing. Specifically, the tasks of multimedia processing with energy-extensive consumption can be offloaded to the cloud, and the face recognition algorithm with improved principal component analysis and nearest neighbor classifier is realized on CGMP based cloud platform. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme can effectively save the energy consumption of the equipment.     

Internet multimedia: answering basic questions

IP networks, including the public Internet and private corporate intranets, have emerged as the common way to carry data, voice, and video - otherwise known as multimedia. Some technologies and protocols that help multimedia work over IP networks are already well established. Others will become more familiar as Internet multimedia becomes more prevalent.     

我为影音娱乐狂

N年前,我们还是半太不小的小毛孩时，总是喜欢听着母亲在耳边温柔地吟唱一首摇篮曲或是讲述葫芦娃大战蛇妖的故事．然后带着满脑袋的幻想甜甜地睡去：N年后．当我们不再年轻．不再需要伴着耳边的摇篮曲去寻找梦境时．一种新的影音元素已经走进了我们的生活，并且在潜移默化地改变些什么．颠覆些什么……     

Intelligent multimedia layout: A reference architecture for the constraint-based spatial layout of multimedia presentations

With increases in the complexity and dynamics of multimedia information communicated by current applications, there arises a corresponding need towards a standard technology for intelligent multimedia interfaces. In this article, we address those components of an intelligent multimedia presentation system (IMMPS) which deal with the design and the realization of spatial layout. We treat multimedia layout as a multidimensional constraint problem and propose a reference architecture for a general-purpose intelligent multimedia layout manager (IMMLM) that is based on a dedicated constraint solver kernel.     

Perspective:Societally connected multimedia across cultures

The advance of the Internet in the past decade has radically changed the way people communicate and col- laborate with each other. Physical distance is no more a barrier in online social networks, but cultural differences (at the individual, community, as well as societal levels) still govern human-human interactions and must be con- sidered and leveraged in the online world. The rapid de-ployment of high-speed Internet allows humans to interact using a rich set of multimedia data such as texts, pictures, and videos. This position paper proposes to define a new research area called ’connected multimedia’, which is the study of a collection of research issues of the super-area social media that receive little attention in the literature. By connected multimedia, we mean the study of the social and technical interactions among users, multimedia data, and devices across cultures and explicitly exploiting the cultural differences. We justify why it is necessary to bring attention to this new research area and what benefits of this new research area may bring to the broader scientific research community and the humanity.     

Personalization in multimedia retrieval: A survey

With the explosive broadcast of multimedia (text documents, image, video etc.) in our life, how to annotate, search, index, browse and relate various forms of information efficiently becomes more and more important. Combining these challenges by relating them to user preference and customization only complicates the matter further. The goal of this survey is to give an overview of the current situation in the branches of research that are involved in annotation, relation and presentation to a user by preference. This paper will present some current models and techniques being researched to model ontology, preference, context, and presentation and bring them together in a chain of ideas that leads from raw uninformed data to an actual usable user interface that adapts with user preference and customization.     

True multimedia presentations: A case study

This paper describes work undertaken as part of a three-stranded project. The main deliverable will be a suite of software tools, classes and components, as well as teaching resources and methodologies to facilitate the production of intelligent multimedia tutoring systems.

The three strands of this project explore differing aspects of multimedia, and while they stand as separate pieces of work in their own right, they also form the building blocks of the final deliverable, which is an intelligent tutoring system. Intermediate outcomes include a multimedia shell and the Manley Group Demonstrator.

This paper focuses on the design and development of the “true multimedia” demonstrator that has now reached the stage of being a fairly mature prototype. It is used commercially by a communications company to illustrate the varying levels of sophistication which can be achieved in presentation systems and provides an exemplar demonstrating the varying degrees of functionality possible using current technology. The main requirement in the design and implementation has been usability both for end users and content developers.

Real-time control of the multimedia devices is achieved using sophisticated software which is tightly integrated with dedicated control hardware. The software can be used to produce canned presentations or highly interactive systems.

The system is installed in a dedicated presentation suite, thus allowing the true nature of multimedia to be demonstrated. It is scaleable in that it can be used to produce stand-alone portable solutions, highly interactive touch-screen controlled applications or complete multi-device high end presentations. This is achieved using the appropriate combination of software tools and hardware for a specific application.

Macromedia Director is used to produce visual and creative material for the system, while Macromedia Authorware can be used to provide interactivity. © 1997 Elsevier Science B.V.