Authoring Support for Durable Interactive Multimedia Presentations

There are two major problems with the current ways of creating interactive multimedia presentations. Firstly, authoring a multimedia presentation is a non-trivial task, requiring a range of skills such as creating individual items in each medium as well as combining these into a coherent presentation. Secondly, after having devoted a large amount of time and effort to the creation of a presentation, there is no guarantee that it can be played back on a platform other than the one for which it was created, let alone whether it can be played back by future systems. To tackle both these problems, we first present an information model for interactive multimedia, so that information can be stored independently of the system that creates or plays it. We then investigate a number of authoring systems. By differentiating four authoring paradigms we classify and describe a selection of both research and commercial systems. These provide examples of the types of support that can be given to authors, and how this support can be provided in practice. Using the approaches and features supported by these systems as a base, we give an analysis of the facilities desired in an ideal authoring system.