« SXSW Interactive | Main | Running around SXSW »

Perspective on Multimedia

Working through unsorted files on my hard drive, I found this piece that I wrote March 29, 2004. Might as well blog it!

A history of multimedia should probably start with the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century. The printing press was the first technology for replicating information so that it could be distributed to the masses, one consequence of which was a broader distribution of literacy and sharing of knowledge. Other communication technologies followed: the inventions of the telegraph, the telephone, radio; the first uses of photography and the creation of motion picture technologies and the convergence with sound recording to make “talkies”; the advent and broad adoption of television; the evolution of computing from massive mainframes to today’s personal computers and palmtop devices; the development of the Internet and the World Wide Web. If you look at a timeline for development of these various technologies, you can see that their evolution accelerated as communication capabilities advanced. Much of the development, definition, and refining of these technologies occurred in the last century; over the last couple of decades we’ve seen a convergence of technologies in multimedia.

Multimedia is the seamless integration of diverse technologies for delivering information and entertainment. We think of multimedia as a digital phenomenon – computers enable the integration of various media. Originally computers were number crunchers, data processing machines. In the mid-1980s, however, our conception of computers expanded with the introduction of the first graphical user interfaces (GUIs) and the mass deployment of the mouse for efficient interaction with visual data. The GUI and mouse were first demonstrated by Doug Engelbart in 1968 as part of the NLS (oNLine System) developed at Stanford Research Institute beginning in 1962. This system included many of the components of today’s digital multimedia systems: GUI, mouse, hypertext, manipulation of graphics, hierarchical controls, etc. Doug described NLS as "an instrument for helping humans operate within the domain of complex information structures." Within the NLS environment, users could compose, study and modify conceptual content, and handle complexity and cognition beyond the normal limitations of human endeavor.

The visual interface model proposed by Engelbart and others is now widely implemented as an inherent part of computing systems, which have become sophisticated media processors. Audiovisual development was driven to a great extent by the development of increasingly sophisticated computer games with 3D graphical environments and high-end audio requirements. As processor speeds have escalated and media content increasingly produced in digital formats, computers have become tools of choice for delivering various kinds of media, and media formats (text, graphics, audio, video) have converged into a seamless mix. At the same time broad implementation of broadband networks facilitate the delivery of high-bandwidth digital services. This is changing the way that media are distributed. Users can download books, records, television programs and films and play them on high quality audio and video systems.

Improved handling of multimedia has resulted in increasingly robust presentation packages, the most dominant of which is Microsoft PowerPoint. Originally launched under the name "Presenter" by a company called Forethought, the program that became the first version of PowerPoint was built with a “slideshow” metaphor where the slides were similar to in layout and presentation to transparencies created for overhead projectors. Microsoft acquired Forethought in 1987, meanwhile similar products appeared (e.g. Lotus Freelance, Aldus Persuasion, and Harvard Graphics). The Mac version of the program included color, and version 2 in 1990 added support for 256-color systems and a "WYSIWYG" ("What You See Is What You Get") interface. The next version included sound and video along with outlining and drawing tools – i.e. PowerPoint was evolving into a true multimedia product.

PowerPoint has evolved to become a standard for presentation as competing products have fallen away. The tool has become a popular, flexible multimedia platform that includes animation, broad selection of aliased fonts, and an ability to save as a web-based presentation. Critics of PowerPoint include Edward Tufte, a leading authority on the graphical presentation of information, who says that “slideware” is insufficiently robust for the presentation of complex information, Tufte has written an essay called "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint" that is critical of the system. According to Tufte, "In day-to-day practice, PowerPoint templates may improve 10% or 20% of all presentations by organizing inept, extremely disorganized speakers at a cost of intellectual damage to 80%." In an article called "PowerPoint is Evil" (Wired 11.09, September 2003) Tufte is a bit more charitable: "PowerPoint is a competent slide manager and projector. But rather than supplementing a presentation, it has become a substitute for it."

Tufte’s critique of PowerPoint has implications for multimedia: media convergence implies increasingly complex media environments, the value of which is lost if presentation and interface are poorly designed. Multimedia applications should be designed around clearly articulated goals, with attention to usability principles: keeping the interface as simple as possible, reducing memory load by providing memory aids or cues, reducing information overload, etc.

PowerPoint is just one example of an application or environment integrating various media. Another obvious example is the World Wide Web, a set of protocols and standards which revolutionized content delivery over the Internet. Formerly text-based, the Internet became a multimedia environment based on the publishing metaphor of the page. Web pages combined text, graphics, and layout, and the hypertext markup language (html) evolved quickly to accommodate increasingly sophisticated layout options, background colors, and embedded media. Web browsers integrated more and more plugins for various kinds of presentation, including audio, video, virtual reality, and interactive communications through asynchronous or realtime messaging. As bandwidth has increased and high-speed broadband connectivity has become widely available, network multimedia applications have become more robust.

The character of the Internet and the World Wide Web is social. The vast global system is a network for interactive communication, therefore operating on a different paradigm from broadcast models like television and radio. Network users will not be passive consumers of media. The net-based multimedia applications of the future will be interactive, facilitating a high degree of user involvement. Online games are one natural form of collaborative multimedia entertainment that will become increasingly popular in the near future, especially with mobile interactive games designed for wireless systems. Games have always been a force driving development of computers as media devices with increasingly sophisticated display and sound, and in the future games will also guide the development of computers as collaborative technologies. Already popular massively multiplayer user games such as Ultima Online and Everquest offer virtual environments where players are represented by graphical avatars that can construct alternative lives and realities interactively with other players – these are more fully realized forms of virtual community, and as they grow and evolve, they will inspire innovations that will be adopted for applications that serve other purposes: collaborative work, or simulations for education and training. The military already uses virtual reality combat simulations, and the University of Texas hosts a project called Entertech that uses digital media simulation training for workforce development.

If you want to get a powerful sense of the state of digital multimedia convergence today, wander through a large urban Best Buy store and try to find something that is not related to digital media. All the television sets have digital components, especially the HDTV sets. DVDs have all but replaced videotape, and CDs are the medium of choice for music. Digital cameras are everywhere now. And computers are displayed as platforms for multimedia, even the Palm top computers and digital cellphones. Eventually with wireless these devices can be interconnected as pieces of media systems for interactive information and entertainment. The interactive aspect is important: it means that users will create as well as consume content.

This isn’t exactly a utopian vision; there are obvious potential downsides – information overload, too much content with too little quality, invasive technologies (sort of like email span, but on a grander multimedia scale). There are still technical and policy issues to be considered, and the "digital divide." But it’s an exciting time, and the promise of the future is, as ever, ongoing innovation.

jon posted this at 8:31 AM
Share on Facebook| email to a friend

 Subscribe to RSS feed for Weblogsky