ralf@SOLBOURNE.COM (Ralph W. Brown) (06/25/91)
I attended the Summer 1991 USENIX Conference in Nashville two weeks ago. The
focus of this conference was "Multimedia - For now and the future".
Consequently, most of the technical papers were oriented towards
multimedia, its applications and the technical issues involved in supporting
it under UNIX. The following is a summary of my impressions of the conference
and the status of multimedia in general. I was wondering if other people
attended and could make comments on this:
1) The hardware technology for supporting multimedia applications is
within a single workstation is available today:
a) Text and graphics capability has existed on workstations for years.
b) CD quality (48 KHz) audio output capability is available today, i.e.
NeXT supports this on all of its platforms.
c) Voice quality input/output is available on most systems, limited speech
recognition was demonstrated by DEC.
d) Image and sound compression algorithms are becoming standardized, and
hardware implementations of these are being produced.
2) The applications for these technologies are lacking:
a) The demonstrations were by systems vendors selling the technology.
b) DEC had a hospital patient records database application, with speech
recognition, speech synthesis, of image display of patient CAT scans,
admission forms, etc.
c) DEC had a demonstration of a video in windows and a real-time
video conferencing system running over a FDDI link.
d) Sun had a simple video conferencing system running over ethernet TCP/IP,
at 1 to 2 frames per second with about a 1 second latency.
e) NeXT had a demonstration of video in windows and their NeXT mail system.
This allowed imbeded speech and applications. Also they demonstrated
a third party application, MediaView, that allowed imbeded speech,
video, and animation in a document.
f) MIT Media Labs demonstrated their work on Newspace, an electronic news
paper.
3) There seems to be three broad application areas that could be supported by
multimedia applications:
a) Communication - i.e. video conferencing and voice/video/electronic-mail
b) Information retrieval - multimedia databases and interactive
encyclopedias, etc.
c) Computer Aided Instruction - technical documentation and training
4) Authoring multimedia documents is very difficult:
a) With the increase in the types of media that can be used to express a
concept, the number of variables that must be managed goes up
exponentially.
5) In order to understand the applications/implications of multimedia it is
necessary to have on hands experience with these technologies:
a) Experience in HyperText/Hypermedia systems like HyperCard is important
to understand how information is organized and used under such a system.
b) Audio input/output including speech synthesis and recognition.
c) Video input, video in windows, etc.
d) Animation including 2D and 3D computer graphics.
e) Integration of these media into a multimedia system.
6) Future areas in which technology development is required include:
a) Image and audio data compression algorithms and hardware.
b) Data interchange formats and standards.
c) High bandwidth networks.
d) Application development and authoring systems.
I would like this to be a starting point for further discussions. I am new
to multimedia, so please keep the flames to a moderate level.
Ralph W. Brown Solbourne Computer, Inc.
Manager Window Systems 1900 Pike Road
ralf@solbourne.com Longmont, CO 80501
...{boulder,sun}!stan!ralf (303) 678-4304