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Some Questions and Answers for the New year

© Anne Kellerman

Multimedia is content that contains multiple media and that is interactive. Some basic questions people ask about this content is what does it mean to be interactive, how do you choose the media and what decisions to you have to make about your choices.

Interactivity: Some day, interactive will be and mean what we see on Star Trek's holodeck. That is you will be immersed in multiple media experiences that you can journey through in any direction your choose and that you can add additional content to this environment very easily. You will be able to interact very rapidly and not have to wait seconds to go from one 3D environment to the next. Today's interactivity on Web sites and standalone PCs where content comes usually on CDs consists of a user's being able to click a mouse or touch a screen, or in some limited cases talk to a computer's speech recognition program to control the navigation through. Some interactivity involves and end-user being able to add content to the existing content. Much interactivity does not take place rapidly, but rather slowly depending on the performance of the end-user's computer or the bandwidth, the connectivity, between the end-user's computer and server where the content is stored. In any case, today and in the future, interactivity means end-user control of navigation through the content and an end-user's being able to add content to the existing content. We are in the very early stages of interactivity.

Choosing media: Now moving on to choosing media you want media that best fit your purpose and the intended audience. One of the biggest mistakes we see in selection of media is authors only pretending they consider their audience in this selection rather than actually putting themselves in the role of their audience and choosing accordingly. Next in choosing media, you want to choose media that convey your information most effectively. You do have the opportunity to provide alternative representations of your information using alternative media so that your audience can choose which media they would prefer. For example, some people like to hear information as in audio and others like to read information as in text. Still others really appreciate graphical representations. Media can help you create a desired mood. Think of the use of music to create a mood of seriousness or even of humor.

Realities of your environment: Your choice of media is influenced by the realities of your creation and delivery environment. You need media that are suitable for your media creation resources, skills, and tools. It would be nice if you had unlimited resources, but let us face it, that is almost never the case. So, it might be hard to use digital images of the football team if you do not have a source of these images or do not have a camera to take the images yourself. It might be nice to use analog video but if you have no way of getting this video digitized and into your computer, then forget this video. Media, especially video, but also audio, requires a large amount of storage space. Do you have this space and how will your audience handle the storage requirements? In the creation process you will have to store your video and audio in the course of preparation, but your audience could if you choose to prepare to stream your video and audio not have to store it on their own hard drives. What are your bandwidth restrictions or to put it more positively opportunities. While broadband connections through Cable modems and DSL are growing, they still represent less than 30% of the population. But, this may be your target population. If not, then, your desire to use rich media may have to be limited by the realities of your audience's ability to play it back.

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