Mobile Media: Making It a Reality

Many future mobile applications are predicated on the existence of rich, interactive media services. The promise and challenge of such services is to provide applications under the most hostile conditions - and at low cost to a user community that has high expectations. Context-aware services require information about who, where, when, and what a user is doing and must be delivered in a timely manner with minimum latency. This article reveals some of the current state-of-the-art "magic" and the research challenges.