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The very word "digital" has acquired a status that far exceeds its humble dictionary definition. Even the prefix digital, when associ ated with familiar sectors such as radio, television, photography and telecommunications, has reinvented these industries, and provided a unique opportunity to refresh them with new start-up companies, equipment, personnel, training and working practices - all of which are vital to modern national and international economies. The last century was a period in which new media stimulated new job opportunities, and in many cases created totally new sectors: video competed with film, CDs transformed LPs, and computer graphics threatened traditional graphic design sectors. Today, even the need for a physical medium is in question. The virtual digital domain allows the capture, processing, transmission, storage, retrieval and display of text, images, audio and animation without familiar materials such as paper, celluloid, magnetic tape and plastic. But moving from these media to the digital domain intro duces all sorts of problems, such as the conversion of analog archives, multimedia databases, content-based retrieval and the design of new content that exploits the benefits offered by digital systems. It is this issue of digital content creation that we address in this book. Authors from around the world were invited to comment on different aspects of digital content creation, and their contributions form the 23 chapters of this volume.
List of contents
1 Access and Retrieval of Digital Content.- 2 Screen Play: Film and the Future of Interactive Entertainment.- 3 Harnessing The Power of Music and Sound Design in Interactive Media.- 4 Comparative Content Analysis of Virtual Environments Using Perceptual Opportunities.- 5 Digitization - An Agent for Creativity, Expression and Interaction?.- 6 Multimedia Challenging Epistemology; Epistemology Challenging Multimedia: Noting this Reciprocity for Multimedia Design.- 7 Virtual Education - Panacea or Pandora's Box?.- 8 An Architecture of a Personalized, Dynamic Interactive Video System.- 9 Buffy, an SL Development Environment.- 10 Generating Interactive Television Programs in the PANIVE architecture.- 11 Interactive Control of Robots on the Internet.- 12 Smart Documents for Web-Enabled Collaboration.- 13 A Video Annotation Methodology for Interactive Video Sequence Generation.- 14 The Creation of an Interactive Virtual Theatre: The Mad Hatter's Tea Party.- 15 Subjective Assessment of a Model-Based Video Codec Compared to H.263.- 16 Model-Based Interactive TV: Scene Capture and Transmission Density Distribution Functions for Bandwidth Reduction.- 17 Enhanced Avatar Control Using Neural Networks.- 18 Virtual Heritage: Challenges and Opportunities.- 19 Marvin: Supporting Awareness through Audio in Collaborative Virtual Environments.- 20 Children's Creation of Shared 3D Worlds.- 21 Experiences With Web Content Creation From a Database.- 22 Numerical Realization of Realistic Head and Hand Models for Mobile Telephone Safety Verification.- 23 Rebuilding Communities and Livelihoods in a Post-Conflict Situation: the Potential for Digital Media in Knowledge-Based Activities in Bosnia-Herzegovina.- Author Index.
Summary
The very word "digital" has acquired a status that far exceeds its humble dictionary definition. Even the prefix digital, when associ ated with familiar sectors such as radio, television, photography and telecommunications, has reinvented these industries, and provided a unique opportunity to refresh them with new start-up companies, equipment, personnel, training and working practices - all of which are vital to modern national and international economies. The last century was a period in which new media stimulated new job opportunities, and in many cases created totally new sectors: video competed with film, CDs transformed LPs, and computer graphics threatened traditional graphic design sectors. Today, even the need for a physical medium is in question. The virtual digital domain allows the capture, processing, transmission, storage, retrieval and display of text, images, audio and animation without familiar materials such as paper, celluloid, magnetic tape and plastic. But moving from these media to the digital domain intro duces all sorts of problems, such as the conversion of analog archives, multimedia databases, content-based retrieval and the design of new content that exploits the benefits offered by digital systems. It is this issue of digital content creation that we address in this book. Authors from around the world were invited to comment on different aspects of digital content creation, and their contributions form the 23 chapters of this volume.
