Digital Video Interactive

Abstract: The Palenque interactive multimedia digital video interactive prototype is based on themes, locations, and characters from The Second Voyage of the Mimi television show, which is being produced at Bank Street College. In the TV show, a cast of scientists and children explore the Yucatan's ancient Maya ruins and are introduced to the science of archeology. The Palenque prototype incorporates this theme to the extent that the user's experience is based on a virtual travel exploration of an ancient Maya site, Palenque, and on the perusal of a multimedia Palenque Museum database. One of our goals was to create a visually interesting database environment in which information in many formats could be browsed through spatially and thematically by children. In addition, we experimented with icon and window-based interface conventions that would make navigation around the video environment motivating and comprehensible for young users.

Abstract: Programming, testing, and maintaining interactive multimedia applications (IMAs) are still difficult and expensive, while substantial progress has been made to reduce the burden on authors. As IMAs get larger and more complex the difficulties will increase. To overcome the complexity of such IMAs, we argue that authoring systems should provide such facilities as (1) a traditional and intuitivedivide-and-conquer paradigm for solving large and complex problems in various fields, (2)formal specification of the behaviors of IMAs for checking the syntactic correctness of visual expressions or semantic anomalies, and (3)automatic aids like validation of temporal constraints and verification of visual expressions. In this paper, we investigate the properties of IMAs for recognizing the inherent interactivity and concurrency. We propose a specification method based on Milner'sCalculus of Communicating Systems (CCS), which is a well-known formal mechanism for specifying the concurrency in various distributed applications. We also design and implement an authoring system calledEventor (Event Editor), which is based on CCS and composed of three tools: a Temporal Synchronizer, a Spatial Synchronizer, and a User Interaction Builder. They focus on describing the temporal and spatial synchronizations and user interactions while they rely on existing tools in Intel's Digital Video Interactive (DVI) for supporting other functionalities. By editing a simple computer aided instruction (CAI) application, we illustrate that our specification mechanism is well-suited for handling the interactivity of multimedia applications, and Eventor is a simple, efficient, and powerful enough tool to handle practical applications. Especially the incremental refinement and the formal specification based on the CCS allow Eventor to be extended with formal verifications to cope with large and complex applications.

Abstract: Amusement apparatus uses digital video interactive equipment (35, 24) to control extraction of video images from a memory (preferably on 5CD-ROM 13) and display (37).

Abstract: Advances in computers, such as DVI technology, are driven by new hardware functionality—more magic in the silicon. But before the chips came the ideas, and years of visual and interactive technical simulations to evaluate product designs and build the support necessary to develop them.